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They're Coming For Me

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Not finished yet!

Wish I had a lot more to show since my absence. I do not. The project is not abandoned though.

Re-doing the Ice weapon behavior.

Art Update

Got back to the game for a bit.

I talked to some cool artists, but realized it wouldn't hurt to try my own hand at pixel art. I came up with a basic grass tile that I'm proud of, considering I don't consider myself an artist.

I'll attempt addressing the previous posted goals this week. If not, I'll at least give the art a slight upgrade.

College Midterm and UE4

College midterms are here. I have been too busy studying and meeting homework deadlines to start on the things I said in the last post. Boo.

Epic made Unreal Engine 4 free. I've been eagerly eyeing it from a distance ever since it came out. Ever since this Christmas I've finally had a computer that can run it. Going to take a small break and play around with it for a couple days.

I'm also considering hiring an artist.

2/25

Made a simple flashing hit confirmation effect. It looks nice but I think I want something a little more advanced in the future.

Re-adding the sounds back in made me realize how bad the current placeholder sounds are. I'm going to get on that this weekend.

Also have to remake the Sentry and Blob enemy types, as well as making a new simple variant on one of them.

Going to revamp the frozen "iced" behavior and some player animation wonkyness.

It Works!

Tackled both the enemy reset systems and reworked the ghost enemy to work in said system. As of now it seems to work great. Steady as she goes.

Is that some background parallaxing I see?

Terrific.

Here's some things I got done:

Revamped ability selection HUD to look a little nicer, as well as anchor it to the screen when you move across camera zones.

Reconfigured and set a base camera size and resolution.

Continuous camera scrolling.

Organized the event sheets.

Fixed a few smaller issues.

Begun the prototype 0-1 level.

I am currently working on:

A system that 'disables' enemies that aren't in the active "zone" and that's kicking my ass.

A screen transition bug that's also kicking my ass.

I plan to work on:

Squashing Necrobook bugs.

Making multiple Lancer enemies work.

Adding sounds back in.

Working on the proto level some more.

WHAT IS THIS?

Back On Track

Hiatus over, systems are improved.

Let's make a game.

The gang's all here!

Two week long hiatus is go.

Because of reasons that I wish didn't exist, I'm going to have to postpone all work on the project for about two weeks. Every day that goes by that I can't work on it saddens me, but it's just the way it is right now. 

Here's an old gif of the Lancer enemy in working form. 

Some more enemies

Got three more done, only showing two.

Roller

Ghosts

Also fiddled with the camera some more.

Watching these gifs reminds me that I need to tune the Player's collision hitbox at some point.

Some things good some things bad.

Camera movement kind of how I want it.

More problems arise from software limitations.

Working on player color changing based on ability equipped.

Begun blocking out demo level.

Talked to a cool guy music guy.

Added two more new enemies to the to do pile.

Read a book.

Still needs additional animation, but it functions.

It's still buggy when you throw it out while facing the inside of a corner.

I just need to edit the player's animation color per-weapon and I think I'll have no more excuses to not prototype levels other than designing a boss fight.

(For the Player:) I'm rapidly finding less things to do for non-art based player systems. I'm almost done give or take. The only consideration left is tuning the numbers if I decide to change the player's size or appearance in relation to the world and enemy size.

Better than boxes.

Oops. When I started this blog I wanted to push for one update every two to three days minimum, and now it's been five days since the last post.

This week has been very busy with college work, and any free time that I got to work on the game, I'd rather spend it just doing that; working on the game. I started losing motivation for updating this. I still have a slew of new features to show off; but when I get annoyed trying to make a .gif image to properly capture something, sometimes I give up. My apologies.

I worked on the 7th ability a bit, and there's only one issue with it left to squash. 

Also begun the great transition from blocks to sprites with actual forms. 

I guess you could say... I hit the ground running.

Back on track

It's late and I'm tired. This still very much feels like two days after the last post, even though it's three hours past that.

Progress has been made. The bug is squished, the advanced enemy is almost ready to be shown off, and what may be the final two abilities are going to be started on.

Boring words update #1

Hello again. I want to do my best to post any kind of update at the minimum of every two days. Sometimes this means that I won't be able to attach a flashy .gif image of a cool new thing, as much as I'd like to.

In development of the new enemy type, I've discovered that some untraceable mistake is affecting the system at which enemies mirror their sprites to face the player. I've tested this extensively and found out that it affects anything that doesn't have a certain behavior, not just the advanced enemy that I was working on. This is a pretty significant bug, and the cause as to why trying to make that enemy was not ending in success.

This means I have to do something very annoying. I am not scrapping everything and starting over. It's not that bad, however, I do have to save all sound and art assets, write down all important number settings, transfer everything to a blank slate, and do extreme break-testing after I redo all of the event placement. This will probably take about a day in me-time, and that's really going to suck.

AAAAAAAAAAAAA- (cont.)

-AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

CLOSE, BUT NOT QUITE THE INTENDED RESULT.

I've been legitimately trying to get this asshole to work properly for the last two days. It's so close to working how it's supposed to (Homing at the player's position without having shit gravity strain screwing with the positional aiming, and not sliding to the right when done for some reason?) but I need to take a break.

Blink Update

I've begun working on that advanced enemy I was talking about earlier. Let's just say... it's not ready to be shown, putting it lightly.

Out of my frustrations with that, I added another basic ability. Check it.

*Blink*

I've also returned to college for this semester. Boo. I'll try my best to not let that slow me down.

Check this menu out!

Boring ability menus are twice as hard to make than the abilities themselves. Getting into the process of making games makes you appreciate the simplest things, such as being able to press down at a menu with an analog stick and not have the cursor spaz out.

I have at least three additional abilities in mind, and after heavy tuning for all of them I might be completely finished in that area!

I still need to work on enemy variety before I can start prototyping actual levels. I've also begun to think about boss fights...

This took way more skill to make than I first considered.

Construct stress, among other things.

Small update here. I heavily modified the vial weapon shown in the previous post. Now you can modify the arc trajectory based on holding the firing button, and it even has an effect to show you when the trajectory is being modified and when it isn't. It could easily be the most complex thing I've made so far, more so than what I'm showing today which is the prototype light shield. I'll demonstrate the advanced vial at a different time.

It works! Also boring sentry enemy! Yay!

Some other stress: I am making the game in the Construct 2 engine. So far it is hands-down one of the best software tools I have ever used. Powerful, simple, and great support. The paid edition is not expensive at all for the power that it offers, and I was aware of the limitations of the free version when starting this project.

Simply put; I'm going to have to save different instances of the project with multiple aspects removed, and puzzle-piece these split aspects back together when I get my hands on a paid version. Complicated, but still possible to work around.

More abilities!

As of right now, I have four working prototype abilities for the game. Two of them I feel are perfected, and the other two definitely work as a concept, but could use additional tuning. One of the ones that need tuning is the Vial Bomb. It is thrown at an arc and explodes when it hits something. It can also bounce off a solid one time before being destroyed.

I came up with an enemy concept that would be fun to fight with one of the other abilities, but it will probably be the most complex thing in this game I've made thus far. I want to at least attempt to get it started tonight.

If you look closely you can see it bounce, and the little face on the vial!

Hit the ground running.

Hello, welcome to my dev blog. I love games, and I decided to make one. I wanted to keep a dev blog updated for historical documentation, comparing the progress of my project, and even possibly generate any kind of interest for the game I'm developing. 

I've already worked a bit on it, and I have a few systems already in place. I have 3 abilities and 2 enemy types working, and I plan to implement a lot more. 

The fastest way to describe the direction I'm going for : Wizard Mega Man, with additional inspiration for Super Meat Boy and Shovel Knight.

Here's a frog AI and an Ice ability.