Animations
Right now, there is only minimal animation in the game. Some modules have a simple animation cycle, but crew are perfectly immobile and just glide around, and guns don't point in the direction they're firing. This will get fixed!
An airsailor carrying a single giant shell to a gatling gun, smoothly sliding sideways.
- Crew will walk, climb, flinch, cough, etc.
- Weapon barrels will point in the direction of fire.
- Carried ammunition will have the correct look: no more gatling guns being reloaded with giant shells.
- More modules will be animated, and suspendium particle effects will be moved from the animations to the actual particle system.
Scaling and glitches
The current drawing system uses a very simple approach for scaling sprites up and down, which means that they look sort of lumpy at any resolution that isn't 100% or some multiple thereof. Moreover, rounding errors sometimes introduce ugly gaps between sprites.
Ugly scaling and gaps between modules.
The plan to fix this is to switch from drawing individual sprites to a more clever shader-based approach that will be faster, produce nicer graphics scaling, and eliminate gaps.
Dynamic lighting
Finally, I want to introduce a dynamic directional lighting system so that the bright flash of guns, the low red glow of steam engines, and the flickering yellow and teal of suspendium can be properly represented.
Other things
I'm also going to look into subtly changing the colour palette of the game to look nicer, making uniforms customizable, as well as introducing a whole bunch of background interest: more birds, better clouds, balloons, etc.
Also, suggestions are highly welcome - do leave a comment below.