Busy today, so so just enough time to do another screenshot. This includes the text I wrote about yesterday (though I've rewritten that code to make it more flexible), the lives indicators, and some more gameplay elements that are too complex to describe.
It's still is missing some major elements before it's really a playable game, though those in a way are the easiest bits to put in. Then lots of tweaking and improving, not least of the graphics which I've been adding to but haven't looks at changing.
Three months ago I described the class BTDText I created for Bug Tunnel Defense to replace the built-in TextField class. I used it again today to add some progress text to my game, and learned a couple of things in the process.
I wrote this shader a few days ago, but didn't want to write about it until I was able to demonstrate it working, which I did in yesterday's post. Now that's done I can describe the shader it used in more detail. It's a very simple shader, that desaturates whatever it's applied to on a scale between 0 (no effect) and 1 (greyscale).
I wrote it for this blog, but it's likely I will use it or one based on it in the future. It could be used at the end of a game or when a game is paused to indicate the game has stopped while still showing gameplay or the game state, or could be used as part of a fade-out between levels.
I wanted to write a bit more about Flash shaders, but was constrained by being unable to show my workings: I can post screenshots and could even host a working demonstration but I could not upload a shader to Wonderfl (images can be uploaded but not other data). Nor could I easily load one from elsewhere because of Flash's security model: I would need to load it from a server where I could edit the Crossdomain.xml file.
But a search of Wonderfl and a further web search turned up the solution: the data can be embedded in the source as a Base64 string.
Another screenshot, with the newest additions called at the moment 'snakes'. As always none of this is final, with the colours easily changed by changing a single line. It doesn't show any actual gameplay.
