Scene from flyboys

Scene from Flyboys

This weekend has been quite productive, even with me stopping to watch Flyboys.

The maneuver icons have been turned into a sprite sheet using custom images. Using the sprite sheet will reduce the number to server requests for the application, and the single image is much smaller than all the constituent images broken out. Apart from the maneuvers I have also done some work on my own plane images. The Spad VII is first cab off the rank. I am currently using plane images from the Blue Max board game but the plan is to have all original art for the beta release.

Planes can now be destroyed and games end. Once the game is over the players can replay each turn of the game, now able to see the damage the opponent’s plane took during the game – something that is normally hidden from the user. Now the game can end it is actually worth playing.

Planes can also now smoke and catch fire. Right now fire and smoke do nothing, which is probably good considering they also cannot be extinguished yet.

Tailing still has to be tackled, but the process of setting up a game and inviting players to it will be the short term focus. When the invite system is a bit more mature I will start soliciting for beta-testers.

Finally I threw together a Hexcell theme for WordPress. It still have a lot of styles from my Carpe theme which I cannibalised to make it.