I’ve kind of gotten into a slump, mostly because of school, but I think I’m back on track to finish this by the 30th of this month. Though I gotta say, it’s genuinely been slog to work on this now. I think I’m burning out

Anyway, for the updates:

• Turret anti-aliasing: To fix the issue of turrets looking terribly when rotating, I used a new function that zooms and rotates the sprite, but also applies anti-aliasing. I can set the zoom scale to 1 and it will rotate the sprite but also anti-alias it. The jaggedness seen in other demos was because the actual map is rended in very low resolution (360x240) and then scaled up.
• GUI Makeover: I have given another makeover to the GUI. Now, most of it in the main game is a sleek semi-transparent black surface. I did this mostly because I couldn’t settle on a particular theme, and I didn’t know how to go about drawing such large sprites while still looking good.
• Waves: I finally got around to adding waves. They are a little buggy, but I ended up making a dictionary structure for the maps and put them in one big dictionary. This way, I can define which enemies spawn in which order, the interval between waves, etc. Enemies and turrets are also in their own dictionaries.
• Health: I added the health mechanic! It will now check if the health is equal or below 0 and send the user to a game over screen. Those screens will eventually get improved.
• Menus: I added a main menu, mostly because I had people trying the game, and it had to happen at some point. As of right now I am working on a map selector that harnesses that maps dictionary from earlier. (I did the devlog now because I was afraid of getting to 10h )
• More menus and turrets: I added a ballista tower, which is slower but has higher range. I still have to balance it some more, and make a bolt projectile, and also probably make the tower control the damage instead of the arrow. That way I can subtract health from the enemy directly, which would fix an annoying bug where the turret shoots but the bullet doesn’t collide with the enemy, so it just stays there until it collides with another enemy. There is also another slime (the red slime) which is faster. This is to force the player to have at least 2 turrets.