It’s been a while since the last update. I’ve been waiting to release a new version and its finally ready! It has lots of new stuff, mostly little tweaks to make the game look more consistent and polished. No new features, I focused on refining a lot of the core elements of the game, but it looks like it has a coherent style now.

Here’s a video, watch it!

Detailed changes:

Visual

• Changed the project’s Color Space from Gamma to Linear for more realistic lighting
• Changed the font of all text in the game to one unified style
• Adding speeding line particles to the camera to give boosting a sense of speed
• Moved dialog so it’s more visible and easier to read
• Added camera shake that uses Perlin noise to determine its movement
  • Shake the camera when the player gets hit
  • Shake the camera when boosting
• Added realistic atmosphere (i.e. outer glow) to planets
• Prevented far away objects from sparkling (commonly referred to as Z fighting)
• Increase/decrease thrusters based on the player’s speed
• Improved enemy target Indicator
  • Alpha gets lower as target gets closer
• Improved objective indicator
• Now displays the distance to the target under the objective icon
• Improved menu buttons and quest menu look
• Now displays the current objective in the top-right corner
• Added an endless AI battle to the main menu screen
• Restyled the player health bar

Logic

• Prevented the player from reaching a planet surface by starting a destruction countdown when they approach
• Improved enemy AI (tutorial to see how!)
• Improved the look of player movement
  • The player moves towards the edges of the screen when they turn, instead of always being in the center
  • The player tilts properly on the z-axis when turning and strafing

A free download of Starship Siege v0.2 can be downloaded from the Downloads page for Windows. Hopefully I’ll have a Mac version by v0.3. I appreciate any and all comments or questions you send me!