Neversky Windows, Mac game

Bit of Interaction, Exam Killing and Minor Details

Week 5/6 - Not Much
So this is our brilliant development blog, detailing all our struggles and mistakes along this seemingly endless journey we call Neversky. Hopefully it'll be enjoyable.

As I said last time, not too much was done because of those pesky school exams. They're all dead now, so that's good. Of course, I had some breaks from studying every now and again, but nothing of too much note was done over the last two weeks. But now that we've got free time on our hands again, I'm sure development will be speeding up again.

Exam-Induced Art

So instead of studying for some of my exams, I thought I'd take some well-deserved breaks, which led to the creation of this. I like to think this was formed though the shear stress of school exams, and that I poured my heart and soul into crafting it. Rather, it's started off as a few blobs on a black background, and eventually resembled something of planets. It's kinda unnoticeable, I guess that's the point, but you might spot a technique I used to spruce up the background a bit. There is a glowing band diagonally across the image, which is my attempt at mimicking the Milky Way when viewed from Earth. I dunno, though it looked cool. It helps to discern the planets from the blackness of space. Might be helpful with the actual game, who knows!

Interaction

Terrible quality, I'll do better next time! Promise!

Some progress here, just enough for a rudimentary system to work. Because of its similarity to ship construction, it was relatively easy to implement a system for selecting tiles on a ship. So that's all to do with that 2D list I made to sort though the tiles on a floor. First, the mouse screen position is converted to a world position, which is rounded to the tiles positions (All whole numbers). With those figures, I plop them into the 2D list and out comes details on the selected tile. Tada! What I've got to do know is actually do something with these selected tiles, like display a menu or do an action. That shouldn't be to hard™.I've identified a few issues (That I already knew, but am only starting to tackle now) related to having multiple ships in the same area. Most will be easy enough to fix, there mainly to do with changing which ship is the 'active ship', the ship the player is currently focused on.

This week's going to consist of sifting through my hack-job of a selection system and making it look nicer. Speaking of looks, I'll also be commenting all the code, cause I hate coming back a few weeks later and not having a clue what's going on in the scripts. I'm sure plenty of people can agree with that. I'll finally have a good think about multiple ships and the likes, but physics are a long way off yet, so I'll mainly be looking at how players board and leave different structures.
And hey, thanks for reading!

Ted Johnson - Cardboard Factory