Original:
http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2012/01/avww-beta-0558-seizing-menus-released.htmlThis one is continues the menu/HUD/text work from yesterday's release in a fairly visible fashion, and it continues the multi-part monster work in a less-so fashion.
Multi-part monsters are working quite well, but now we're doing all sorts of fun other things like making it so that you can shoot a gun on the machine to jam it, or you can shoot and destroy its wheel to make it unable to move. And we're having things like enemies with multiple weapons attached to them, and are even working on things like enemies that can change form mid-fight.
So... lots of extensions, and those are going to be benefiting the (as yet unreleased) urban crawler, the recently added urban predator, and the longstanding crippled dragon. A lot of these enemies (especially those which are bosses other otherwise "centerpieces") are taking longer than the smaller enemies tend to, but they are really a lot more interesting.
Ultimately I think that a satisfying experience comes from having a mix of enemy scales and complexities, though, so we'll be having a lot more smaller enemies in addition to these big beefy ones. Once I get finished with the GUI work that I'm currently doing, I'll be working on some smaller enemies, some player spells, some new spells for existing enemies (such as the skelebot overlord and centurion), and environmental hazards.
Speaking of the GUI work, that's made a lot more strides today. We now have word wrap on the sprite text, plus a lot of other new features. And a lot more sections of the interface now make use of the new functionality, which generally makes the game feel more polished and easier to read. And it solves probably a dozen cosmetic issues that I'm going to have to go back and hunt up on mantis. Not to mention the performance benefit.
At this point, I've pretty much converted the entire HUD of the game, and all that is left is all the menus and the tooltips. That comes with its own set of challenges, of course, but I'm hopeful that I can get that finished up in a matter of a couple of days and be back onto more interesting things. There were a lot of bugs that we just couldn't solve any other way than ditching the Unity GUI, though, so that's what we're doing.
This SpriteText stuff, and the general GUI revamp, is something I've wanted to do since at least this time last year, if not long before. It was one of those things I just never seemed to have time for, and I kind of built it up as this really overwhelming task in my head, so it was easy to keep putting it off. Coming back from the holiday I was really energized, though, and I decided to use that energy to finally tackle this thing. So far it's going really well, knock on wood!
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that
here.
