In this release we added the ability for players to enter a name when they start the game. The name is displayed just below their ship during play.
This really adds a lot of fun to the game because you can tell who the other ships below to, making it much easier to seek out and destroy your friends!
I decided to just not display any name for the Bots. I did this because it seemed redundant to have a bunch of ships flying around with the same name. Just having no name serves the same purpose. Plus, rendering text is actually fairly expensive so I wanted to save on that.
The implementation pretty much went as planned. I did end up saving off a couple of enhancements for a future release:
- Showing a blinking cursor in the text box. So far my test team indicated that it is not intuitive as to what you are supposed to do when first starting the map. I think having a blinking cursor will help with that.
- Add a “start” button. Having a start button should also help polish the landing.
