Refactoring and upgrading the old

Refactoring the save & load system

The whole save and load system was a bit too ambitious at the start. I have planned it so the player could save anywhere in the world, which, of course, is nothing new. But now I understand what problems that kind of system causes in a technical sense. I managed to get it to work with the current system, and it saved all projectiles, particle systems, enemies, the player, etc. correctly, but all the time I added a new thing to the game. I have to add the save and load system to it. That gives too much work in the long run, so I decided to save the game only between levels, which gives me a lot less to think about and is also a more bug-free system.

New sprites

The player's spaceship got a new look (again), and the old minigun looked a bit funny when it was mounted to the ship. The new one looks much better.

The new models of the player's spaceship and minigun:

You can see both of the new models in action here. Also, notice the hit shield when projectiles hit the player.

I was creating a shop item icon, which was supposed to represent an item that the player could collect for the store and buy later on. But I notice that I accidentally created a new health pack icon. Here is the original shop item icon:

It looks very much like a health pack, right? So here is how it transferred to the health pack icons.

So I have created a new health pack icons, but I still have to create a icon for the shop items. This icon was a bit tricky one. The end result might not be too obvious, but I was not able to figure out a better way to represent this kind of item. The shopping cart is out of the option in this case. Here is the second attempt:

Minimap was one of the first things I drew, so I thought it might need an update too. No big changes, but the minimap frames were updated.

Parallax layer

I got feedback that the map could use some parallax layering, and I agree. I'm still working with the asteroids, but here is the WIP-sneekpeak of it.

Summary

Lots of updates for visual things, or at least I hope these were upgrades, not downgrades. :) Now I have plans to focus on getting the turret building system finished and also adding gamepad support to the building system. I also have plans to finish up parallax layers, and I'm probably going to draw a few asteroids during the following month.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading.

Teemu, TheAspen