Turn-based games, especially the ones with static sprites, tend to look boring, so I try to use relatively simple effects to make Zemeroth look more interesting and alive. Some other similar visual effects are planned, like animated fire or swaying grass/bushes.
First, a tile under the cursor is highlighted now. Highlighting is disabled though on touch devices (by ignoring an event if its delta movement is zero).
Next, agents now can be flipped horizontally to match their action's direction. I've wanted to add this for a long time because sometimes units were attacking each other backwards and it was weird.
Also, spearman will get special directional attack frames soon, because he can attack enemies two tiles away from him and it looks weird with completely static sprite sometimes.
Spreading the Word
There're a couple of non-code updates.
I've added a "Roadmap" section to the readme to show in which direction the project moves.
The game now has a text logo. It's a manually "low poly vectorized" text written with the Old London font. Not sure if it really fits the game, but it'll do for now.
I got the ozkriff.games domain (but haven't created a landing page there yet, so it redirects to the devlog for now).
I had a break from Zemeroth for a few months but it didn't really help - still tired of this protracted project. I don't want to abandon yet another unfinished game, so the plan is to force myself to complete a minimal two-release roadmap and declare the game kinda finished.
The main idea behind this final push is to ignore all tech debt and focus only on tasks that aren't that hard to implement but will result in a user-visible changes. Hope that will compensate my terrible self-discipline!
Well, the final push didn't work. Zemeroth was mostly on pause for the whole year, but!
Thanks to @Fedor's porting efforts and lots of macroquad improvements, Zemeroth is now in early access on Google Play!
Note that the macroquad.rs's tech stack isn't well tested on a wide enough variety of mobile phones yet so a lot of device-specific issues are expected! Please report bugs either to Zemeroth's GitHub repo or to #zemeroth channel of the QUADS Discord.
Also, check out a new macroquad tutorial "Publish game on Android with Macroquad" if you want to learn how to release macroquad-based rusty games on Google Play!
