Huge improvement to the forcefield's graphics: Release of Spaceships version 1.3.2
New version
Following the release of version 1.3.1, I have released Spaceships version 1.3.2 which includes even more improvements to the game's graphics. These improvements are a huge change to the forcefield, making it animated and more detailed, and minor changes to the bullet texture and tinting.
The graphics improvements are shown in the linked video.
Forcefield improvements
Previously the forcefield was just a radial gradient, nothing more. This extreme simplicity worked well for the first few releases where graphics wasn't too important. But after the release of v1.3.1, this very basic gradient doesn't mix well with the much more advanced sky recently developed.
Because of this, I made the forcefield's graphics much better by making the gradient more detailed, adding a "ring" of lightning and animating everything with a pulsing effect on the gradient and lightning.
I also added particle effects when bullets are deflected by the forcefield.
Before
After
Bullet improvements
I have improved the bullet graphics by making them lighter and making the tint that more damaging bullets get be redder. The purpose of this is that they stand out more in some default sky presets.
I also am now giving a tint to bullets that are deflected by the forcefield.
Screenshots
Here are some screenshots of what the bullets now look like.
Regular bullets
More damaging bullets
Changelog
Major changes
- Added animated lightning to forcefield.
- Added pulsing effect to both forcefield lightning and gradient.
Minor changes
- Made forcefields render above the player.
- Made bullet texture lighter.
- Added tint and particle effects to deflecting bullets.
- Decreasing the alpha of the block border when its pixel width becomes too small. This reduces an ugly graphical effect when the camera moves at low speeds.
Bug fixes
- Improved textures by not using fully transparent black as the background of exported SVGs. Even if the value in the alpha channel is zero, the RGB component of those pixels can make a difference in how the image is rendered, if the image is smoothly scaled (because of interpolation with the neighbouring opaque colours).