November update

November 09, 2015

November 09, 2015 corentin

corentin DEVELOPMENT

DEVELOPMENT No Comments

November?

The last post was in August, and we are in November? Already???

Ok, here’s what happended: we had several contracts with a very big company. Very interesting work. The downside, of course, is that we had not a lot of time left to work on the SHMUP Creator.

The good side is, well, we have some money in the bank, which is always good news, and we resumed our work on the SHMUP Creator 3 weeks ago.

Yeah!

Right now, I’m mostly working on correcting bugs, cleaning the code, correcting bugs… This is a good time to consolidate the code in order to have a robust tool before attacking the polishing phase.

On top of that, there are a lot of new features and corrections, like:

. if the user modify a texture, a sprite or anything while using the SHMUP Creator, the game updates itself automatically

. we can customize a lot of new things, like the textures for the scores, the multipliers, the game overs etc.

. we can use a trigger “random”, to launch event randomly

. we can use a trigger “item”, to spawn items (for example, if the player kills certains enemies)

. the rotations, scale and translations of any entity can be modified numerically

. the background can now use lightmaps to light it, on top of the realtime lights

. there are a lot of code optimizations, especially for the bullets

. tons of small improvements for the GUI and the tool itself

What next?

We can’t predict how long this phase of development will carry on. After that, we will go back to the user interface and update it with the new features (mostly gameplay related) and the new tools.

We would like to add some kind of tutorials inside the SHMUP Creator too to help people start using it.

And the last big thing: we wil create an horizontal 2D level, using sprites. It will ship with the SHMUP Creator, and will help us polish the tool and correct the last bugs.

So, stay tuned!

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