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[JamesRossi]

Starting to play around with camera and ball physics. Ball increases in size based on height, and there are different friction values for being in the air vs the ground. This is the first attempt at this, so I am happy that it works, even if it's not really realistic looking right now. I'll need to refine it.

[JamesRossi]

New baseball physics, and the slow, plodding start of player AI. Right now they are choosing a random player to throw at and then doing so. Sometimes they choose themselves and just throw the ball at random. Fortunately the throwing system ought to be reusable enough with a couple extra tweaks.

The shaded areas are the current "area of interest" for the players. If a ball is in that area they will run at it. If it is in no ranges then the players freeze up. I will add a check to see if the ball is unclaimed and let the closest player approach it if it becomes an issue.

One of my next big tasks will be ball placement prediction, so that players can run to a predicted landing spot instead of moving toward the current exact ball position.

[JamesRossi]

So, had a bit of a break from Apocaleague. Part of it was medical, but I've been working at making my rat's nest of code worse in the last couple days. I will maybe do some research on better methods later but I made an inventory system in the past 3 days.



Right now you can choose any player, the type of equipment you want to change, and then the list of appropriate items is displayed to choose from. Stats are now affected by having different items equipped. Currently they only provide boosts, but I already have in place ways to handle negatives as well. I did some scripts to handle getting player stats so they are much more nimble. I plan to include small % boosts from perks and they can easily be added into those scripts as I develop that system.

I spent some time last month making goofy Twitch integrated toys to play with and it was a good experience, helped me get back on track here.

[JamesRossi]

So, for some interesting reasons, I took a look at how my game handled resolutions and the like. As a result, it is now going with a 16:9 resolution. This will help keep things from looking weird on the now far more common resolutions. Also, shown in the gif is that since the game is mostly user interfaces, they are now scaling with the screen. You can dynamically change the resolution, but that's mostly for general testing, I will probably create a menu to select your resolution later.

One thing changing the resolution also allowed me to do was to add MORE STUFF TO THE MAIN SCREEN. When I was working on the equipment screen I was feeling the pinch of available real estate, so I'm glad to expand that to hopefully make what is going on more clear. It also has let me toss up a calendar to the main screen, shown below, to help the player plan ahead better.

The ultimate goal is for everything else to resize dynamically based on resolution, along with the calendar. This way if you make the screen really big, or kind of small, things should still be crisp and clean, instead of having issues with increasing/decreasing the level of zoom on the window. Some things will still have some scaling, like the art, but that is much more manageable and passable than how bad fonts look scaled around.

[Shirsh]

Hey guys, here also an art update:
Recently I asked James if I can take a part of making Major Apocaleague Baseball and when he decided to give it a try made couple of pictures.

Here's a general manager's office and General Manager of Safeton in the flesh:




thumb up need a revision, right
Now, while dynamical resolution in a progress and sizes of images requre some thoughtful decisions, I making a mockups for baseball players (well, anatomically based on Ali from Beyong Oasis):



I'd expect a lot of changes in them though.
And as you can see I have no intention to destroy "MS paint doodles" charm but hope to pump it up to the stars. That's all for today, bye.

[Shirsh]

Guys spent more time in the gym, lose some weight, got some muscles. Uniform also got some tailoring.

[JamesRossi]

Shirsh has been really great to work with. I'm consistently impressed with his work and could not be happier that he's decided to help make the game look better than I could ever do on my own. I can't wait to start properly implementing his baseball sprites.

Meanwhile, UI rework continues. Nothing too impressive to show yet on that front, been a lot of invisible things really.

[Shirsh]

Baseball dudes keep going through iterations and refinings:



That's first time I'm trying iso-ish sprites, appears that trying to make them simultaneously generic and more or less able to induce sympathy is harder task than I thought



Not sure what is better projection for the field though

[JamesRossi]

Seeing the two side by side for the first time, I definitely prefer the field to be at an angle instead of directly down. Gives a much better sense of depth. It also lets the players feel like a part of the visual instead of resting on top of it.

Thank god Shirsh has been making some pretty things to look at, cause all I've been able to do is start updating some of my menu system to the new 16:9 resizable one, and like all good designers, I hate and must rework everything I touch after leaving it alone for too long.

[JamesRossi]

Spent some time to show the game off in action and just talk a little about what's going on!