Functional *and* Fashionable
Happy National Kazoo Day! This week was kind of a mixed bag in terms of what I worked on. After last week's push for the media tour, this week was a time for going back and fixing things that weren't quite right under the hood but that were better left until after the deadline: fixing memory leaks, making things more efficient, etc. Also, it was a time for putting in more features that you can actually see:
First off, you've probably noticed that the overlays which indicate which tiles are usable are a lot brighter now. We wanted to make it crystal clear which tiles were usable. Before brightening (B.B.), the overlays sometimes blended in with the underlying terrain, but no more! A new age of clarity has dawned and there's no turning back!
But, even more interesting is the introduction of those little icons in the lower left corner of some of the planet's sectors. Scott (who we like to call "Scott" here at the office) whipped them up so that we could show which sectors give bonuses when certain types of improvements are placed on those sectors. So, for instance, if you were to build a power plant on the sector with the lightning bolt icon, the power plant would put out a little extra juice when it became operational. If instead you built, say, a farm on that sector, you'd get no bonus. The number and type of bonuses isn't finalized yet, but there will probably be about a half dozen or so. It just keeps getting better.