14th June - Map Zooming and Arenas

I’ve finished a big chunk of the main menu - see above! I’m very happy with how it looks, especially the perspective effect on the table (such a pain to polish but very proud of it). There’s still the background to do, and resizing the map and table, but I’m planning on returning to that later in development.

For now, it’s finally time to get back to the game itself!

Doing the menu put me on a visual polish path, so I couldn’t resist adding some extra flair to the intro animation.

The idea is to zoom in on the field, as the chopper’s altitude lowers. To do this, I need a system to zoom in and out of a map anchored by a centre point, and for all other sprites around it to scale and reposition accordingly.

Tough stuff!

Through some trial and error, I found this solution. First, I’m using u/tufifdesiks’s smap function to scale the map.

The width is based on the top left corner, so I needed to move that corner to the left when zooming in.

By finding the proportion where the anchor point lies within the original map coords, I can move the top left coords (tlx and tly) accordingly.

This results in a very easy and token-efficient method of zooming the camera in! I’ve also implemented sprites, but I want to clean those up and make separate spr and sspr functions before recording it here.

Let’s add it to the chopper intro!

The CPU usage is a little high, so I might switch back to the normal map function if zoom=1, since most of the game is played at normal zoom level. I think it looks pretty good, though it’ll definitely need some surrounding environmental detail to sell the descending effect.

Currently the whole game takes place in one arena; the chopper drops you off, and you fight through waves sequentially until it picks you back up again. This is fine, but I want to add a stronger sense of progression.

I settled on a system reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda, or modern rogue-likes such as Hades and Enter the Gungeon. Each wave takes place in a different arena which the player must travel to, adding a more player-controller pacing and a feeling of fighting through a larger chunk of territory. It’ll also help with the endless mode and adding smaller arenas later!

Back in a bit with more details. Follow on Twitter/X for smaller updates, and leave your thoughts and feedback in the comments below!

@wsasaki01