Today has been mostly a setting up day. It is surprising how code written several years ago is still on shape. The game engine allowed me smoothly add a few shaders for the game. Underwater god rays, an explosion that will be triggered when several bubbles are pop at the same time and some rays that will throw from a power-up (think of some well known match-3 game’s chocolate ball).
I had some trouble enabling background rendering surfaces backed by a framebuffer where the rendering appeared to just fill 1/4th of the screen. I forgot my sprites by default have translation anchor at (.5, .5), so that was an easy fix.
It took me around an hour to enable post-render effects on top of the background surface. Not by the renderer capabilities, but because I had to plug a new pre/post Scene render hook to properly draw a Node2D into the offscreen instead of the main screen.
This is the result so far. Forgive my art capabilities that are close to 0 (from the negative size).
Plans for day 2 include some fancy lines-over-a-cuve. These will be the indication of a popping group of bubbles. Popping bubbles will also leave a trail of smaller bubbles moving up. I will probably won’t address playability until day 3.
All this renders beautifully in my android tablet, running inside my v8 wrapper:
Stay tuned.
