(Best with Internet Explorer)
The most obvious changes are the improvements in the battle mechanics. The enemies now use area of effect attacks which give a warning before they fire. This allows the player take more tactical actions by positioning their crew to reduce the impact of the attacks. Both the Minotaur and the Kraken bosses make heavy use of this. The Kraken also has some new custom AI which allows it to be an interesting fight on your ship as it attacks from different areas.
Another major portion of work was focused on improving the UI. There were several goals that we wanted to achieve with this work...
- Create a custom theme which helps tie the games visuals together
- Improve usability by adding some additional features for controlling your crew's AI actions and selecting crew effectively
- Reduce the amount of chrome on the screen to prevent it from getting into the way.
This work is still in progress, but you can get a feel for the changes in the latest build. We should mostly finalize on it by the next build.
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| Example of new UI |
Lastly but not least, there was a major effort around rendering optimization. This was a bit more technical, but basically what happened is that we were using a custom sprite rendering system due to the large number of sprites on the screen. However, we refactored this to unity sprites which make it much more efficient. Furthermore, we now have much more control over sorting order of the sprites which is great because it allow us to layer the various particle effects in with the sprites which we couldn't do before.
As always, thanks for your support and let us know what you think in the comments!
