Development update January 2022

Welcome to the first development update of the year!

In January I could only work on Virtueror from the 11th, but I have been pretty productive since then and the results of all that work are here for you to see.

New dialog to create units and structures

Most of the work this month went into the implementation of the new dialog to create new elements in game which I introduced last month.
Implementing the dialog didn't take too much time, but before doing that I had to implement a new unified stats system for units and structures and I had to change several things in the existing code that handles how new elements are created.

The dialog itself went through several revisions and improvements.
For reference, this is the initial mock-up I posted in the previous update:



And this is how the dialog looks in game now:

The new version of the dialog can show an extra element, it has room for more attributes, all elements have a title and a description and colors are used to highlight what resources are sufficient and what are in need.

New structure: solar panels

Now it's possible to build solar panels that, once connected to your base, generate energy.



A solar panel occupies a single cell of the map, but you can build and chain many of them to increase your production.

New structure: storage units

I added 4 new structures that act as storage units for the different types of resources. Once connected to your base it's possible to accumulate a bigger quantity of the corresponding resource.



As for the solar panels, each structure occupies a single cell, buy it's possible to link and group together several of them like showed in the image above.

New scene element: mountains

The spiky rocks you might have seen in older posts or screenshots, have been replaced by mountains, which I believe fit much better the style and the scale of the other graphics.



I am not planning to use the old rocks from now on, but maybe I will introduce a revisited version later.

Minor updates

During this month I also worked on many minor improvements and fixes.
Some of the most noticeable are:
- Rendering optimization that limits the part of the map rendered for better performance.
- A new loading screen used to pre-load resources when the game is launched.
- A brand new, bigger, 80x80 map.
- New screenshots for the Steam page of the game.
- Game source code in the GitHub repository is now updated to the latest changes.

What's next

February is going to be the first full month that I will be able to dedicate to the development since I restarted to work on this project last December.

I might spend a good chunk of the upcoming weeks on the creation of a first version of the level editor, which will be fully integrated in the game.
I said "I might" because I am also thinking about implementing some sort of procedural generation for the maps. Something like that would make the editor less important for now.

Soon I will probably post a poll in the Discord server of the game soon, to check what people would prefer. Make sure to join today if you want to vote for it.

Other features I would like to work on this month are a new, improved way to build walls and conquer cells and maybe upgrades of units and structures.

Support this game, add and follow!

If you enjoyed this update and if you want to support Virtueror I would really appreciate if you could spread the word, but also add it to your collections and follow me on itchio to stay up to date with all the upcoming news and updates.