Happy Tuesday! The team continues to make steady progress on multiple fronts: building, UI, and combat. To keep the good mojo going, I’m experimenting with making these updates in video form. Let’s see how long we can keep it up.
New Vision Modes
This is our solution for peering into the insides of buildings once they’ve been built. There are three modes
- Normal mode, in which you see everything normally. A bird’s eye view of your town with rooftops and all walls shown.
- RPG mode, where we hide all walls that face the camera, allowing you to see inside buildings. As you rotate the camera, any walls that obstruct the interior of buildings are hidden. We call it RPG-mode because it ends up looking like the interior shots of buildings in the old 16-bit RPGs that inspire our the game. We really need a better name for this mode.
- X-Ray mode, where we hide all walls and roofs, but we show the bottom 1 voxel of walls to give you an indication of where they are on the map. This mode is pretty buggy at the moment, but from the video I think you can imagine how the finished feature will end up looking.
Game Speed Control
Play an pause now work! We also have the ability to run the game an arbitrary speeds (2x, 4x, etc). We’re playing around to figure out what speeds make sense to expose to the game. Speeding the game up too much causes all kinds of visual glitches, so the max-speed we’ll allow you to run at is still being decided.
What’s Next
We’re pushing towards an Alpha 4 release roughly a month from now. That release will be focused on building improvements. It will have the new vision modes, play/pause control, and more!