Final Eclipse Updates - New Years edition!

Progress on Final Eclipse has been steady I’m happy to report! Since the last update, I have completed several tasks, some visible, some not so much. Most notable:

• Completed widescreen port of the intro and title sequences and updated some of the graphics to fit.
• The rendering of the game uses layered images to create the world view. To help support adding new art to the game, I created a script to automatically render a single texture into the required various sizes and positions/perspective, so that not every perspective has to be hand drawn, though of course some will need some manual cleanup and polish. But it should be a big time saver. I also added some of the new art that Corey drew into the game to test it, with pretty good results! I might use this one as a device to refill oxygen for your life support suit:

Another view of one of the new doors:

• I re-implemented smoothed movement rendering, using a technique which zooms in the view from the current tile when moving forward, zooms out the view from the tile behind when moving backwards, and slides in the next rendered tile when strafing/turning. It only takes about 5/6 frames so the effect is hopefully convincing enough, even if it’s a hack. :D
• I added a pause menu with options such as full screen, and making the above smoothed/animated movement optional because some will find it distracting. As well, I implemented input remapping for the major keyboard controls. See these new options in action in the video below:

A lot of minor refactoring and bug fixing as I start to get ready for the next phase of content creation. I’ve had an idea for the starship that the game takes place on, the Eclipse, for some time now. But I’m going to start giving it more of a full design in earnest. I am planning for at least 6-7 more or less full sized decks, with a couple of sub-areas that won’t necessarily count as full decks. We will see how much I can fill that space with!

In terms of remaining gameplay features, I want to give the automap a bit more love, and create a larger version with various icons and markers that you can add along with notes. Always helpful to better remember things for later. I also need to start implementing the save/load system. I have some ideas for new enemies to implement as well. Will be fun to start putting some more flesh onto the bones of this engine!

See you in the next update!