New assets, new mechanics

Pre-Alpha 2

We've hit our goal of reaching a second distributed pre-alpha on time. This time we have new assets, improved mechanics, a new menus system, and more of the engine is active and working.

For example, the power plant actually converts dilithium to power finally. Gameplay got some FPS improvements. Midrange mobile devices now have a fallback map with lighter textures, so we hit 50+ FPS on a Nokia 6.1 (previously under 10FPS). Our first build for Linux was a success, and we'll be building for that platform weekly going forward.

Lots of challenges with reading config files this week which pushed back our original goal of externalizing all of the major difficulty settings. 

Our GameShell edition is out for voting now (if you'd care to try it out on the web, or on your GameShell). That version has the same general concept as this version, but was implemented in a very lightweight fashion on Phaser 3. The requirements for open source and ultra-light footprint on a tiny 320x240px screen with no GPU acceleration were interesting constraints. The lack of a proper IDE or dev kit were also challenging. The full-scale Dragon edition is developed with Blender and Unreal Engine.

The goal for next week is yet more assets, more engine functionality, and improved foley and sound effects.