Devlog - 9: Influence improvement

Devlog - 9: Influence improvement

Yesterday was a bit hectic for me so I didn't have the time to organise what I did and post something worthwhile so here's the update with a small delay :)

Continuing from the last devlog, I wanted to improve the current influence tilemap to feel like an actual expansion of your faction over the environment. In order to do that I didn't want the influence tilemap to remain as a singular tile, but to actually connect as a single whole.

This is how the influence tilemap looked like before:

This is how it looks like now:

As you can see the tilemap is now completely connected and connections will appear between influence tiles to keep it as a one whole.

It took a few tries to get this right as it wasn't exactly straightforward in the implementation as well as art. I definitely didn't want to draw all the different combinations or kill the performance by doing a ton of checks and loops. In the end I got to a satisfying implementation where connections are set only once when needed, and nothing is checked all the time + there's not a lot of art that's needed as the connections are layered on top of the normal tile. In this way only connections that are needed can be activated, without having to draw all combinations.

This will be it for today's update, see you tomorrow.