Starbases, Firepower, and Fireworks
With the 4th of July cutting into the work-week of most Americans, and a miscommunication of company policy giving us the 5th off as well, everyone on the game's team had the pleasure of a four day weekend. I spent most of this time in Pennsylvania to celebrate the 4th with family, but was back on Wednesday to get some work done before another weekend decapitated my productivity.
A roadblock was reached in the art department 2 weeks ago when we realized that there was no system in-place to get animated graphics into the game. Sure, the planets rotate and the ships move, but that's all done in code. Many of the tasks still on our list rely on the artists being able to animate objects beyond a simple rotation.
So this week Jake was able to finish work on a parser that would make the animation process considerably easier. With that we were able to make some headway on ship battles (enjoy the volley of sad faces while you can), as well as progress on Starbases (where players have to explicitly decide what type of Starbase they will be building, and get different modules based on that).
This is a Phase5 Military Starbase from different angles. As you can see, this time around Starbases will actually be colored based on your race, so hopefully nobody was too attached to the GC1 way (where the base was grey with a strip of the races color). I wasn't initially sold on this method, but now that I see it in practice it makes a lot more sense.
That’s about it for my short week. We're planning a final Beta II build next Thursday: unfortunately the Starbases won’t make it in, though I'm sure you'll end up seeing them when August's Beta III rolls around!
Till then, Happy Gaming!