Crucible XVIII 18/04/2014

Another week of work gone by- faster than I would have liked. Managed to be pretty productive too. I wanted to take some time to nail down at least a tiny portion of the UI... and I did! I can now consider the design of the system summary popup done, and made a lot of changes to the general behaviour of a lot of the UI so it looks more pretty. Also continued on the changes to heroes.

State of the Game (Build 1.03):

• Broke through the 100th build barrier! Woo.
• Finished up the system overlay design. Now the information is conveyed much more visually (rather than the ugly box before). The overlay itself is displayed based on camera distance to system (so that they don't clutter the screen when you are zoomed out). However I have just noticed that the central orange ring (which shows the number of planets colonised in the system) is a little hard to distinguish- so I may need to make a minor alteration to make it larger.

New system overlay. System borders disappeared due to zoom level.

• Decided that my previous super-complex and non-functional method of drawing the empire borders consumed far too much time, and didn't even look that good. So I have gone for something a bit simpler (actual texture is WIP)...

Actual racial colours not working (for some reason). Notice secondary resources in Infobar.

• Added hero improvement functionality. Each hero has different bonuses that can be improved. There is no limit to the number of resources that can be spent in any given stat (other than the number of resources you actually possess).

WIP Hero improvement screen for Soldier type.

• Slight change to secondary resource mechanics. If a system produces Antimatter (for example) it receives a bonus to Ownership growth based on the amount of Antimatter your empire owns. This means that systems containing planets that produce Secondary Resources gain a bonus according to the resource in question, and the amount of that resource your empire possesses. The reasoning behind this is that not spending resources on heroes improves the systems that produce those resources, but has a negative impact on your hero quality. If the resources are spent on improving the hero, the systems producing the resources suffer. (It's a trade-off, see?).
• Some mild changes to AI- nothing of note. General fixes, particularly in relation to 3 player games (for some reason it were broke). Some slight changes to balance (why am I doing that now?), and also to the way that resources etc. are calculated.

Hope you like how it's coming together! That's it for this week, see you next time.