v0.2.1 - Change Summary

Planets

There are now 14 planets with unique modifiers and textures for each planet.  You start on Tsorbia and must complete the given mission for each planet (survive night 10, 15, etc) to unlock the next planets.  There are 2 main branches of planets to follow.  There is room to add specialized missions, or challenges, in the future to spice things up.

It was an odd journey since I decided to use 3D spheres for the planets in the UI menu, in a game that is highly configured for 2D.  I ended up not messing with the lighting settings, and instead made shadow spheres around the planets to simulate lighting.  The system map turned out great though, with the sun using a custom shader to make a nice distortion effect combined with a particle system, and planets with shadow, atmosphere, and clouds.

Normal Maps

I added normal maps to the ground textures and the enemies.  The colors on the normals indicate the 'angle' of the surface as seen from the camera, so it creates a 3D feel on a flat surface by interacting differently to light in different areas.  Now the lighting feels more natural and has more depth.  Through the process I learned more about Physics Based Rendering materials, which could add further to the textures and atmosphere.

Damage

The damage in the game is variable, where one hit can do slightly more or less than another.  I've combined this with a critical hit system which currently doubles the damage on a critical hit.  The combined effect is a nice range of damage for normal and critical hits.  I then adjusted the TextFly script I made a while back to allow for text to pulse it's scale while flying and linked the scale factor the the factor of totalDamage/baseDamage, so that harder hits pulse harder and become bigger.  This is a very satisfying effect which changes the feeling of combat drastically.  It's much more engaging now.

Gun Sights and Dynamic Accuracy

Now each gun has its own laser sight, which indicates the level of accuracy.  The accuracy hones in, at a speed based on your Weapon Handling skill, and you lose accuracy when performing a variety of actions, and your Weapon Handling skill reduces accuracy loss from actions as well.   The laser sights also raycast to hit structures (could be enemies or other things too) to help indicated when something is in your way.  This is a feature I've been wanting for a long time, and am very happy with it.

And a whole bunch of other changes and additions, details on GitHub