Omegapolis Devlog #0 - The plan, history and goals of the project.
Omegapolis Devlog #1 - Character design process and some initial art.
Omegapolis Devlog #2 - Drones
Omegapolis Devlog #3 - Prototype
Omegapolis Devlog #4 - Wade Watson Character Spotlight
Omegapolis Devlog #5 - Maiya Watson Character Spotlight

Been A While

Hello all, I know it has been a while since the last dev log. Over a month I think? Honestly there has not been a lot to show. I have been hard at work still though, it has just mostly been backend stuff. Ended up doing a LOT of refactoring and building out a few systems to get ready for the up coming features. I feel like the code is in a pretty good state at this point though and things are starting to come together. 🌠

GUI Work

When I chose to use orx as my game engine, I knew it had a few hurdles to clear along the way. One was definitely the lack of a GUI toolkit. A lot of other engines have a visual editor of some kind and this helps a lot when designing GUIs. But even when they don't, there is still usually a library of code for building the GUI, for example Heaps has a library called domkit that lets you build GUI compenents with CSS and HTML like controls. Orx does have a couple libraries that can be used in Nuklear and DearIM but they seem more useful for building desktop engineering type GUIs and they aren't the easiest to work with IMO. There is a little talk of integrating other libraries but I suspect that would take time and potentially come with their own problems.

After a few weeks of exploring and experimenting I decided to STOP OVERTHINKING this. Orx has images, text, and object alignment and I can just code things as needed. So... I designed a bunch of the UI elements in Inkscape and brought it all into the game. I'm pretty happy with how it all turned out honestly.

The Title Scene as I am calling it will definitely be updated in the future. It is just a functional phase 1 kind of thing at the moment. The title itself is going to get an overhaul. The background will definitely get some better art. The actual character select is going to get altered too but this works for now.

The pause menu is pretty basic and works so not a lot to say there.

The in game HUD is where I spent most of my time and I think it turned out really well. As you can see in the video, the ability cooldowns are reactive. It is also ready to 'unlock' further abilities once I get going on the upgrade and threat systems.

What's Next

There is still a ton to do. I need to actually build the currency systems, the in game upgrade systems, the goals system, the out of game upgrade system... the list goes on. I also am up to like 40+ backlog tasks I've made for improvements. Once most of this is in place, I can finally just start building content for the game. I have 2 characters with 2 abilities and 2 enemy drones. But that is just a minimal start. Every character is going to end up with at least 5 unique abilities and there will be a pool of shared abilities as well. There needs to be more enemies, bosses, etc... but once all the game systems are in place, I should be able to just work these one at a time and hopefully fill up the world in no time. 😁

It will probably be a while again before my next update but stay tuned if you want to see how things turn out. I'm pretty dialed in on this so as long as my A.D.D. doesn't throw me off a cliff anytime soon, you can expect more and more progress updates.