Parallax Scrolling

Somewhat subtle in that GIF, but stars in the game now have parallax scrolling added to them. This gave me quite the headache trying to figure out how to get this effect without ruining the framerate. Additionally, the stars are now set within screen space instead of being spawned throughout the space system.

No More Borders!

The biggest complaint I got from the demo was the borders around the playable area. These are now gone and have been replaced with seamlessly teleporting the player to the other side instead. This gives the illusion that it wraps around, and feels better to play.

Resolution Options & Window Modes

Something I noticed when people played the game was that Unity no longer popped up a splash menu. So players couldn't choose resolution or window type. So I decided to add them into the options menu. I haven't had a chance to test them outside of the Unity editor yet though.

Other Changes

• The circle waypoints rotate on no longer as a jittering effect.
• The star system generation has been changed to be more modular instead of being contained all in one script.
• Stars and other elements now scale to camera zoom.
• The player is now speed capped.

What's Next?

I am currently populating a few image boards (The ones for artistic references, not certain places on the Internet that we shouldn't talk about) that I'm going to use to brainstorm new designs for various items and objects in the game. In other words, the next several weeks are going to be dedicated to improving the game's art.

Priority wise, I'm probably gonna start off with making some new planet art and stations. I need to re-do these the most as the current sprites use dithering which causes graphical flickering which could cause problems with players with heightened visual sensitivity (i.e. Photosensitive epilepsy). It also just looks bad when I stream development of the game, and the camera zooming makes it worse. Following that will be new ship designs, which will then need to be adjusted with the old animation system that I use for animating the engine thrusts.

A lot of work, but at least it's not a ton of programming.

That's it for this update. There probably won't be another post for a while, but as always, you can follow development during the week on Twitch.