Dev Log #4.2 - Map UI & more

Under the hood

I had to write an update before I lose track. We’ve onboarded new team members and improved our workflow and infrastructure, did some UI work, added lighting and textures to the hangar scene, and more.

The hangar

This is a scene where players will spend a lot of time in, and it will load and unload often. This is tricky because lightmaps make loading slower, and not having them makes the device noisy or thermal throttle to compute shadows and GI. I think compressed lightmaps are the way to go here.

Playing with godot engine volumetric fog on high settings. I will follow my own principle of “everything that can be baked, should be baked” and bake those too.

I will show in a later tutorial how I use these in alpha blend mode cards for high performance effect that looks almost as good as the real thing.

UI and Godot scripting

Giiba made some progress on underlying systems for the game, such as having buildings and upgrades that cost money, and tracking all those resources you gain and lose during the course of the game.

This system allows us to determine the cost of various items directly from the node inspector, allowing game designer to tweak balance without opening dozens of different gdscript files.

We could go on a larger expanded tutorial later if folks are interested.

Giiba says:

The key takeaway from this I feel is to start small and simple, add functionality incrementally, and work towards game integration (not from)

The map

(Honora talking)

I have to improve my Godot skills somewhat. Team says start small and self contained, so I chose the expeditions and map screen. Ambitious.

Started with just a jpg and some png icons with a collision 2D that emitted a signal when mouse input event is triggered. Then I used that to print to console. Later I realized not taking things from the UI/menu classes could cause trouble.

Same scene with a bit more progress and refactor from Giiba.

The outliner shows just green icons for everything menu related, afaik It indicates that they are UI/menu class nodes.

Buildings

And lastly, we have some progress from Khaleer on Buildings.

This is the scrapyard building, which has 3 levels of upgrades. Animating this will be challenging but look so fun!

The scrapyard will be one of the two buildings we chose to include in the mvp (minimum viable product) for the scope of the web demo of the game.

Other

We’re also slowly building up the required steam marketing art such as steam capsule designed to look good with logo.

Option A seemed like a clear favorite internally.

We joined the Godot dev fund as a gold member. Making a game in Godot, this is only natural to support the dev fund for as long as we can.

(it takes a village)

Support this open-source engine for game at https://fund.godotengine.org

• Shipyard Devlog
• Gdscript
• Godot Engine
• Programming