This update doesn't have a download to accompany it, but I decided to at least tell you guys how things are going. Or I could disappear for a couple months, but would I do that? (Please don't answer than, I'm a terrible developer. Development team. Developtron.)
I've been working a lot on the cubes and laser turrets in particular. Whereas before the cubes would simply disappear when the fell of the end of the level, now they have a death sequence, where the cubes now shrink into nothingness, but by the next downloadable version, there will also be a particle effect when the cube dies.
Additionally, the evil laser turrets can now harm good turrets and cubes (we offered them anger management classes, but all they did was turn their lasers on us). To show the level of harm inflicted upon the poor cubes/turrets, their texture will change as they get more hurt, to look increasingly abused. I've finished the beat-up textures for cubes, and by next update I'll have done so for turrets, too, along with textures for turrets.
I've also made slightly better models for turrets and I'm halfway through texturing them. The good turrets look much the same, just with a couple more details on the legs and parts of the front, but evil turrets look more like the good turrets in construction, with a bit jutting out of the bottom with the second laser coming out of the lower part. But the best thing about the evil turrets: they now have angry faces!
This was a very comical suggestion from a friend, but maybe it needs more work. However, the angry eyebrows will stay. When either of the turrets dies, it turns into a pile of debris, which you can see in front of both turrets. Then you can fling the debris around like no tomorrow! You also can't collide with the debris, so you won't be subjected to a horrible bumpy ride while walking over it, and when you pick up a not-dead turret, you won't collide with it, which was a problem before.
Under the hood there have been a lot of optimisations with turrets too, mostly that evil turrets now don't have two turret scripts attached to them as I've re-written some of the laser's code, so they use less memory. Which is always a bonus, because everyone loves having RAM lying about. There's also a couple less interesting tweaks and additions to the pause menu, but no-one cares about that because it doesn't have eyebrows.
Well, that's about it for this update. I'll keep you posted on how things are going, and I hope to put out a new download soon. I may also have a new level done by then, but we'll see how that goes, because I might improve other stuff first.
-Daniel
