Water Glow, changes and a website

This new glow provides a nice light to the otherwise dark world.  I also made a couple more changes.

First off, the controls.  U now changes the lighting.  It does what 4 used to do.  A friend of mine also gave me an idea for an alternate control setup.  If you hold down Shift while pressing IJKL, the game now places an item.  If you hold down Control, the game will drill.  Not holding down anything will shoot.  You can still switch modes manually.  I'm thinking I will make this something you can turn on and off.  The other change I'm going to make is have Q and E switch the active weapons.

The next thing I added is recoil from shooting.  It doesn't move the ship too much, but it's enough to notice.
Next was an auto-save right after you load the world and everytime you pause your game.

Lastly, I created a website yesterday.  It can be found at http://www.astrominer.net.  I posted a bunch of screenshots and a link to the forums.  I will still keep this as my dev blog, but I'm going to post releases on the site.

I'm going to use this as my official changelog for this release:  http://www.astrominer.net/f/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4

Anyway, busy night and I still have a lot to do.  I also got Battlefield 3, so if I disappear for a few weeks it's not my fault.

Installer this week, new forums, list of changes and a screenshot.

Upon today's completion of v.04Alpha, I've decided to post the installer to let more people test the game and installer itself.  I was using ClickOnce for testing before when it was only a couple of people helping me out, but I'd like to reach for a larger crowd.  Since I can't have ClickOnce constantly pinging my server for updates (I'd quickly run out of bandwidth), I decided to switch to WiX.

Sometime this week (probably tomorrow night) I'm going to post a link to the installer.  I'm actually going to post it on my new forums at http://www.astrominer.net/f/.  This will still be my dev blog (especially since it's a lot more reliable being that it's hosted by Google and all), but those forums will be a better place to actually discuss things about the game itself.  It also gives me an idea of who is playing my game and will let me limit the link instead of exposing it to the whole world (I'm not ready for that yet :/).

Anyway, register at http://www.astrominer.net/f/ when you can and expect a new installer soon.  Here's a list of what was done in this version:

- Biomes (this had the basics completed, but will be an ongoing effort as the game progresses)
- Liquids (water was added.  I need to add Mercury but I want to think about how I want it to appear/act first.)
- Terraforming Concept Brainstorm (I have 3 pages of notes about terraforming.  It's going to be awesome and probably my favorite part of the game.)
- Add 2 enemy (Parasite and Spy)
- Add 2 structures (Bucket and Laser Door
- Loading/Saving Progress Screen (this is good for now.  Will be made prettier in the future.)
- Time Cycle (planet/sun)
- Player Spawn Bug (this was due to the map moving in the title screen.  It's been fixed.)
- Sprite Draw Error (this was a rounding error when I was drawing the sprites.  Fixed.)
- Bullets randomly dieing for no apparent reason. (this was due to the bullet collision algorithm not correctly compensating for the global world position and instead only using local.  Fixed.)
- When only drilling with the left drill bit on the bottom drill, the drilling animation was not shown.  (Fixed.)
- Added ability to hide UI using F4 key.
- Deleting worlds on the 360 was throwing an error. (Fixed)

And finally, a screenshot that I really liked.

I like the feeling of aloneness that this conveys.