Nanograte

   Obviously I've been drawing a lot of my inspiration for this game from Tron and Geometry wars.
I've been meshing the units for the game as 3D representations of circuit diagram symbols. That's worked out okay thus far, although most of the symbols don't translate well into looking like an actual 3D object. There's a three phase motor in the background of this shot that is hard to see, but I've mostly been playing with fuses. You can see some of the color and shader experiments I've been going through. I keep waffling between additive (left) and  self-illuminating (right) shaders. I like the transparency the additive gives me without having to worry about backface culling or more complex meshes and UV layouts, but I am somewhat worried about them becoming difficult to tell apart in swarms. I've been trying to test them in the combat scene our programmers have put together, but I've been experiencing a few technical difficulties. If the project moves beyond the prototype phase we'll modify the asset pipeline to make mesh substitutions much simpler, but other things are a priority at the moment.

   I've mostly implemented color switching of meshes based on the controlling player's color into the combat prototype - just need to hammer out an issue where replacing the objects in the human player's swarm causes the new objects to misbehave. As is I just replace the neutral objects with prefabs with different texture maps instead of tinting a grayscale version of the texture on a per-object basis. I'll deal with the obstacle to doing that when we set up a proper asset pipeline.

   Woo motion trails. Moving on.

 

   I've been tweaking a script I found online for doing animated sprites and using it to animate lights moving around in the background of the circuit board texture I'm using on the terrain. The texture right now is a placeholder. I wasn't thinking far enough ahead when making it so it doesn't tile if I rotate different tiles and the animation draws attention to the fact that its tiling. Oh well, I learn a bit more with each failure.

   The principles behind the animation script are going to be incredibly useful down the line. It will be trivial to display unit status simply by storing several textures on a single image and changing which part of the image is displayed as the unit takes damage.

   Also, I added explosions. They are pretty, but annoying to get screenshots of.