Weekly-ish Devlog - Alpha 5

Skipped last week because I was out of town for most of it and I'm approaching this cadence a little slower. I'll be targeting for releases to come every two weeks or so from here on in. I'm also going to push my public & steam releases down the road a bit too, but wanted to make sure I spent the time this project wants and didn't cut any corners.

The game is in a bit of an awkward state at the moment. Mechanically it's almost identical to last release, but there are some major UI refactors and changes under the hood.

Release Notes:

• Good UI System
  • This is mainly under the hood. But popups are more standardized and maintainable now
    • +Added a sophisticated Transition system to make it easy for me to add transitions to UI elements without cluttering my code
• 3D Texture abstraction
  • Another refactor-type change
  • Added a generic way to use 3d Models in the UI
    • Still some work to be done here
  • This'll eventually be used in a few more places across the game
• Main menu rework (wip)
  • It's more professional already imo
• Better Card UI (wip)
  • Cards are now 3d objects that can be flipped as the UI needs
  • Still needed:
    • Particle effects on flip
    • Models for each card image
    • Responsive card-move-on-hover effect + moving the 3d texture camera as the viewport moves

Known Bugs:

• Web version is a bit jank still
• Lag spikes probably still exist, let me know if/when/where you run into thes

Next up:

Next release I'll be aiming for wrapping up these UI changes to a beta-appropriate state. Here's what to expect from future releases past that point. Updated 'resource collection' system, more sophisticated animation tree for 'stopattack' style interactions, more efficient rendering all around, physics corpses, merchant and wizard behaviors,  basic music loop, SFX pass, optimization pass.