The 2nd week is over and I am proud to announce I managed to work on WoCS everyday since the end of september. That’s a little achievment for me 😀

Now onto the actual wrap up of the week.

UI, UI and more UI

Yes I wanted to be done with the UI by the end of week 2, but as it happens I’m not. Most of the functionality is done though. I still need to change the visuals for all the menus but this shouldn’t be too big of a problem. After that I would say the UI is done, until I have played with it a little and have a feel for the new UI.

I already have a small concern that I will need a new station UI because as it is now it might not work well on mobile devices. And as stated by a comment in the orignial LD entry this screen is taking you away from the action.

There are still some little tweaks here and there that need to be implemented. I need to disable the time controls whenever the player shouldn’t be able to use them i.e. when he’s in a menu. Also the time controls are just dummies yet.

Not only UI happened

Because working on the UI got a little boring I decided to throw in some fun work. I played a little with visual feedback. When the player earns money the counter will actually count up or down as seen below.

I also tried to add a trail renderer to the ships, but the result didn’t make me happy so I scrapped that again. I might reiterate over this but I’m not sure about that.

A small gameplay change made it in already aswell. I didn’t like the fact that planets closer to the player station were “better” because your ships would arrive earlier. It felt like I had no choice in the early game but that I had to hope that I don’t fuck up the universe by selling to the closest planet. Now the ships will travel the same time to each planet. This should enable players to control the universe a little better… I hope.

Another little change is that the player can play a 50 days game. Which usually is the point where the player gets full control anyways. The player can still play for 100 days, but to be honest unless you’re trying to get the highest possible score by min maxing and uber timing everything you aren’t getting anything out of it yet. I try to think of a way to change this. Maybe pirates start to show up after 50 day. Maybe the size limit on military ships will increase. I’m not sure yet. If any of you guys has any ideas let me know 😀

Random Thoughts

Again I’ll throw out some of my random thoughts and plans for the future.

Planets should grow over time and not just get huge with a big weapon shipment. This is pretty easy to implement actually but it’s still on my TODO list.

Ships that are waiting at your station can be shown flying in a circle around the station. I like the idea of showing my numbers in different ways. I’ll still keep the number in the header so you don’t have to count manually. I would like to show money and weapons aswell somehow. Like a pile of gold. But in space this seems a little dumb. Do you guys have any ideas for a nice visualization?

I like the time controls. They will definetly stay. But what I don’t like is that the game doesn’t auto pause when I am inside the planet menu or any menu except the station upgrade screen. It’s obvious that the player doesn’t want the game to run in the background while he is thinking about how many weapons he should sell to the planet. Also the UI buttons for the time controls should be hidden when I’m not supposed to use them.