Update #5 - Adding two new areas and enemies

Hello all. After some time off I made some nice process the last few weeks.  I'm kinda sorry for the slow development but then again, this is a hobby and I experience spikes of activity and then downtime where I do other things like maintaining my house :)

Area 2 - The Caves

First up was adding area two and this is a cave area. First I made the rough block-outs to have area parts that align correctly and create interesting areas to fly through. Each part aligns with all the others in this area so I can mix them and generate slightly different play experiences each time you play the game:

Area two is a cave area and I wanted to make it look rocky and arcade like. After some failed attempts I found a good guide on how to design and draw rocks. It might seem simple, but getting things wrong will result in not convincing blobs of pixels that just don't feel right. So I got cracking after some attempts came up with these rocks and cave designs.

These are all created from smaller rocks that combine to make interesting formations. The small rocks act as the glue between the landscape and the bigger rock formations.  The alignment and colours are off in this development screenshot but after tweaking and anti-aliassing the various transitional areas the landscape pieces are created and these can be combined in game and create a nice looking landscape:

All landscape tiles in Godot are created with the enemies and installations on it, ready to be placed alongside each other:

Here you also see the annoying saucers that twirl about and make life difficult in the caves. Together with the thread of the launching rocks it creates that classic game play:

Area 3 - Comet Wasteland

Next up was area three. In this area the player is bombarded with comets while flying over an open landscape again. The comets travel fast so it's necessary to anticipate when to strafe the landscape to get that much needed fuel.  This is tricky and therefore very engaging. Quick reflexes required.

The comets themselves are rotating rocks with sparks and smoke coming off of them, but I might add some more bright bits to it later on to make them more appealing and stand out from the rest of the scene.   A timer is started when the player enters this  area and comets are generated off screen and they twirl into view.   They are destroyed when they hit the landscape but otherwise they destroy everything else :)

The landscape itself is the same as in the caves, but with no top parts... I probably will add some new variation here to make it stand out from the previous area. But I kinda like this already.

I implemented a new and better screen-shake  with more control and smoothness. So the screen shakes when comets hit the ground. I might add comets that take a more direct path to the ground later on. This depends on whether this area is actually doable :)  Take a look at this action:

Recap

So, two new areas added with some tweaking required but that happens naturally. One thing I noticed it that the first area now looks kinda bland, so I will do a new graphics pass over those landscape tiles when I feel like it.

Next up is area 4: The City.,   This will be fun, I can go overboard with all kinds of building designs and structures.

OK, till next time!