I’ve spent two days adapting Fight Back for higher res and I still haven’t touched any of the code! I’ve just been mocking up new gameplay and menu screens in GIMP, trying to get a handle on how the game will look.
Menu wise, I’ve decided to break things up a lot and go for a clean, simple layout that’s a bit like Rez:
I’ll probably put some soft-focus stuff on the right, like ship schematics or something.
In-game – ignore the actual detail in the background, it’s a quickly filtered snap from Google Maps just as a placeholder 😀 The ships are higher resolution but the same size on screen, and I’ve put in the new dual energy bars instead of the old heat bar:
If I end up targeting Flash Player 11 or download, I may end up doing 3D backgrounds for this.
The next job on this project is to go into the code to decouple the rendering from the game logic. This is going to be messy, but when it’s done I’ll be able to drop in all these new assets no trouble – and probably still support the old resolution, if I feel like it!
It’ll be interesting seeing how Flash copes with doing about 8 times as much work. The higher resolution means there are six times as many pixels to draw each frame, and that shot above has one graphics layer more than the original – for vignetting. I think I’ll probably end up targeting Flash Player 11 just because it’ll hardly run on low end PCs otherwise 😀