The past few days have been very productive – usually after I realse an iteration the week after is barely any coding/development – due to burn out, but I feel good right now. This could be because instead of my usual “release during the weekend” deal I released during weekdays. Tinal testing Tuesday, creating the installer on Wednesday then created the youtube “promo vid” on Thursday, meaning that I couldn’t spend the entire two weekend days on working on the project instead I did it in sections – since development/work on this project happens after my day job. Anyway somehow I avoided burnout.
On Saturday I started working on Turret mode. Meaning manual control over turrets, from their point of view. This actually was somewhat implemented about a year ago. What happened was that there were some issues with it (for turrets that were side mounted), and I didn’t have nice turret art so I disabled it and moved on. Because a lot has changed I had to re-work the existing turret mode and rebuild the gui, that took most of Saturday. Sunday was a bit more polish to the gui and I started on “multi turret mode” meaning control over more than one turret. So the player can hop from oen turret to another, or grab more than one, then spin the camera aorund the ship and have the turrets track the player’s view and if the player choses fire on that location.
I think its pretty neat Its my hope that this will enhance the “capital ship” mode of game player, fighters are already fun to fly, but cap ships turn slow, so what their appeal hopefully will be in this turret mode.
As I was putting in multi turret mode I ran into a problem – the player ship sometimes would obscure the target – since the camera spins around the player ship – the player ship is usually in view meaning that sometimes it can be in the way of your target, so what to do? I could automatically move the camera’s psoition up and down to look over/under the ship, but should the camera move up? or down? Both are valid answers – so what I came up with is to allow the player to manually control the camera up/down movement in multi turret mode (just like the player can controll the zoom) so I think this means that multi turret mode will be more fun and active Hopefully players will feel the same way too.
Still a bit to go, hopefully I’ll be done with turret mode this upcoming weekend, if it takes me two weekends to get a neat feature in, I’ll take that time line and be very happy with it
Almost forgot – because turret mode allows the view from the turret I’ll be modifying some of the heavier turrets to have a recoil when they fire, to give a bit more to the experience.