The latest release 0.4.0 brings some eye candy to Nomad. I added a nice animation for the ships landing phase and a nice cloud shader.
What’s New
Landing Phase
Previously I introduced the jump mechanic. Now, when jumping to a new sector the player can choose where to place the ship on the map. Additionally there is a nice landing animation that shows the impact of the ship when landing. Its quite satisfying.
I really like how this turned out in combination with the grass shader as I included a flattening phase after the shockwave, that pushes the grass to outwards.
See it here in action:
Why & How it was built:
I added this animation because it gives the Mothership a sense of massive physical weight and scale of the ship.
Choosing your landing spot also gives the player more tactical options:
- Landing close to rich ore veins means shorter logistics lines
- Choosing natural terrain bottlenecks (coming soon) helps defend against oncoming alien waves.
New Cloud Shader
After showing the prototype to my brother he suggested that i replace the ores scanline effect we had previously:
With a new cloud shader that goes over the ground terrain, grass and ores alltogether:
Why & How it was built: The scanline was a nice effect but did not really make sense (concentrated sun rays in a rythmic pattern?). The new cloud shader looks much more natural.
What’s Next
For the next version I will add Construction Drones to the game. This will replace the primitive base building system we have right now where you just click the blueprint on the ground and it magically appears :)