v0.4.0 - Evolving Mutants, AI Voice + Message Panel

Evolving Mutants

Added special enemies which contain a genome, 3 genes, and gain a fitness score to determine which ones reproduce.  They each have a body, head, and leg gene.  The top performers blend their genes semi-randomly to create new children, and the parents and children become the next generation to spawn into the game.  They get spawned throughout each night within the sub-waves, and their fitness score is the average between those lifetimes.  When new enemy types arrive from the regular sub-waves, their genes and a new individual are added into the mutant generation.  The new individuals get 8 lives to find a fitness score before being considered for evolution, to prevent their genes from being wiped out immediately after being added to the gene pool.  There are also random 'mutations' that happen, where entire body parts are replaced, and/or the scales of the body parts are randomly adjusted.  The scale of the body parts determines the stats such attack damage, health, mass, move speed, etc.  There are also currently 2 populations, Fighters, and Fodder, which score fitness in different ways, leading to more outcomes and preservation of the gene pool.

So, the final effect here is that the enemies evolve depending on how you play the game, and are rewarded for kicking your butt.

Message Panel

There is now a message panel containing a 'video' screen and message text beside it.  The video is a simple animated background and portrait sprite.  I used AI to create an AI robot for the portrait, and AI also created the background.  I then used Aseprite to animate the portrait to talk, and also animated the background.  Then, I made the mouth only talk when the voice clip audio volume is above a certain threshold.  The result is actually pretty good, considering the audio sync work only took 30 mins, which was mostly fiddling with animation and script parameters.  I used ttsmaker.com to convert text to decent speech.

So, the message panel holds a queue of conversations which contain lists of messages.  New convos can be added to the queue at any time from anywhere.  I used the mission objectives to hold objectiveStart and objectiveEnd convos, and the MissionManager triggers them when they are available.  Also, planets have their own PlanetDialogue which is set up to trigger convos at each wave's Start or End, as well as at the start of the planet, before wave start.

Tutorial Improvements

The tutorial is now it's own playable 'level' and can no longer be turned on/off at any time.  Voice messages were added to compliment the mission objectives and introduce things to the player.  A 'touchscreen only' flag is used to supply extra information for touchscreen users, due to the unique nature of the control scheme.  Some objectives were added to the tutorial to support recently added features, making it even more thorough. 

Various Fixes + Improvements

- Game is now rendered inside the 'safe zones' of touchscreen devices
- Added VideoPlayer and an intro video as a prelude to the tutorial
- Some balancing to Repair Gun, difficulty progression
- UI tweaks and fixes
- Aim Joystick is now disabled by default, available in the options menu on touchscreen
- The Mission Panel can now be hidden, saving valuable screen space
- And a bunch of other fixes