The Alpha is Nigh

Oh wow did time fly. I did not realize how soon Alpha is. It's been longer than usual since my last post. This is because last week I was on spring break and at GDC. Basically that means that I did no work on Super Sky Mech (not that I was expected to). However, the Alpha date was a rough reawakening. It's crunch time now and I'm ready for it. This week I've been working on getting the level ships spawning into the world. This requires its own manager as the possible spawn points need to be managed and chosen at the right time to spawn level ships. To keep the game running quickly I'm implementing a chunking system which will only evaluate spawn locations that are near the player rather than all of them. It ends up looking like this when visualized in the engine:

Each colored section is a different leveled area and each smaller rectangle is a chunk. The spawn points are assigned to the chunks programmatically based on position. In-between each level area there will be a larger "boss" ship for the player to beat which this manager will also handle.

Before creating the start of this manager I worked on two other things this week. Brent is a part of the levels team now since we don't really need new tools at this point and so I finished up some work to get the level building process ready for him. I solved a standing bug and sorted out one which cropped up while I was away. I also wrote a guide on the wiki about how to make and bake levels so they're ready to be spawned into the world. We have our work cut out for us to make Alpha but we've already made good progress and I'm not worried.