Turnover Update - Snipers, Shaders, and Stuff news

The past couple weeks of development have been very fruitful for Turnover.

Turnover now has a new enemy called the Sniper. Snipers camp out areas and snipe at the player. The Snipers will likely get the most work out in open areas, where they can keep the player restless.

The Sniper might get more abilities as time goes on, so I’ll have to wait and see how things pan out.

I’ve also begun using some fragment shaders to enhance the look of certain parts of the game. I used one on the windows to give them a bloomy, fuzzed out look and used another to give bullets a little motion blur. I’m still exploring the best places to use them without overdoing it.

So far, I made sure that the GLSL shaders were v110 compliant, giving Turnover a graphics requirement of OpenGL 2.0.

I redid the game HUD, consolidating icons down and making sure that it scales properly across a wide range of resolutions. One thing I did is completely removed the stamina bar and integrated it into the “stamina guy” icon itself. It felt redundant to have two indicators for stamina.

Regarding resolutions, the minimum resolution I can support before HUD elements start to become problematic is 720x480, so that will likely be the bare minimum. Tested up to 1080 works great. Even funky resolutions should be supported without any problems.

Next, I’ll be spending time planning and creating some more floors to help move development along. I’m still waiting for the feedback on the last 11 floors. Once I get that from my tester, I’ll revise and decorate those so I can start finishing those up.

All in all, things are humming along. I’ve finally busted some long standing bugs (the pathfinder being the biggest), so I’ll move onto the rest of the main offenders (Intel on-board, I’m looking at you). Once those are resolved, I can leave the engine alone until performance tuning.

I still don’t have a release plan set in stone for Turnover yet. I would really like to have the game enter the alpha stage sometime before summer. Spring is rapidly approaching and things have plenty of forward momentum, so I’m optimistic.