Sol-Ark (2D Space RTS/SandBox/Rogue-like) New Devlog (07/07/2015 CheckPoint) news

We want to give a HUGE thanks to everyone who helped us test the latest build of the game. Some of you racked up four or more hours of playtime which we find truly incredible. I’m sure the body count for dead astronauts is well in the hundreds. Nice work. We have received an immense amount of feedback about what is working great and what needs to be improved. It’s helped us formulate a better development plan and given us a good, hard look at where we need to go in order to build a great game.

Part of this decision involves switching our engine over to HAXE, which will help us tremendously in the long run. Much of our time has been dedicated to crafting the particulars of an engine that suits our game’s needs, which are quite complex, but utilizing HAXE at this stage will allow further progress to come more smoothly and readily.

We’ll be announcing some things in about a month from now, so stay tuned, and if you managed to get your hands on our build we hope you play it until the solar system is littered with dead pirate bodies.

Screenshot compilation:

List of performed works:

• Fixed bugs:
• With wrong calculation of inflicted damage on approach to the Sun;
• With wrong calculation of displaced sprite coordinates when applied by two lens effects;
• With wrong space background texture offset after restarting game;
• With wrong calculation of lit areas when drawing micromanagement map using the GPU;
• With extra pathfinding miscalculations;
• With unnecessary calculations for a sprite’s curvature that goes beyond the radius of the curvature zone;
• Other bugs
• Algorithm was optimized for updating the count of available resources for the player;
• Algorithm was optimized for searching for an empty container to add resources to;
• Algorithm was optimized for creating locations;
• Algorithm was optimized for rendering the space and warp backgrounds;
• Algorithm was optimized for displaying curved parts of the space background;
• Algorithm was optimized for lighting GUI elements;
• New shaders were added to display sprites with a modified gamma;
• Algorithm was added for applying the effects of soot and melted parts on the micromanagement map using the GPU;
• Algorithm was added for rendering items on the micromanagement map when using the GPU;
• Algorithm was added for drawing fire on the micromanagement map when using the GPU;
• Work continues on the micromanagement map level’s visualization algorithm for the GPU;
• Work continues on the first official teaser video for the game;
• New music tracks were created; work continues on voice, sound and music coverage for the teaser video;
• Work continues on polishing balance, fixing small errors and creating content for the first demo-version of the game to be released to a broad audience;
• Work continues on filling and polishing the GDD;
• Work continues with transferring the game engine to the HAXE engine to increase game performance, allowing us to support more platforms for porting and increase the speed and ease of game development;
• Transferred all cycle commands, standard functions and variable types to HAXE standards;
• Work continues in searching for inconsistencies and errors after transferring the source code commands to HAXE standards;
• Settings were adjusted along with imported libraries and modules necessary for the translation of the game source code to Haxe;