Right so, had a thought shower last night and came up with some ideas. Life in Space is a good theme, and with Tim Peake in the news a lot at the moment, I wanted to create something with the ISS in it.

I often struggle with creating fully fleshed out ideas so I wanted to get a fair amount sorted up front.

A game isn't really a game until it has play/win/lose states...

So my idea is thus:

The International Space Station is floating through space, constantly orbiting the Earth, in its path is a load of space junk! Your mission is to clear the path for the ISS. Hence:

Space Sweeper

The ISS has a laser cannon mounted on it to clear debris, which you can control with the keyboard. Also you'll need to send out intrepid astronauts to collect fuel/power ups/special treats, you'll control them with the mouse.

If the ISS takes too much damage, or all your astronauts are killed, game over.

Score based, with increasing difficulty levels - more junk!

I've created a GitHub repo : https://github.com/artSturgeon/spacesweeper, but there isn't much in there yet.

I'll be using Kotlin and Ashley, so first task is to set up Gradle/IntelliJ for Kotlin compilation, and get a couple basic systems in there. Then I'll use Inkscape to create some initial mock ups and basic graphics.

I'll be tweeting progress : @art_sturgeon

And posting here, and on my website : houseofsturgeon.org

Thanks for listening!

art

Ok, end of day two. Got some basic Ashley components and systems up and running. Made some (very) basic graphics in Inkscape. Put the two together...

And then spent ages fighting with maths trying to get bullets to fire from the right location...managed to make a pretty bullet hell pattern in the meantime though.

Finally got it working, added in a FiringSystem with a spawn timer, all is good.

Next need to add some pooling, I'm creating too many Entities!

Then onto collisions I reckon.

I got stuck with some Kotlin code earlier, and got some really great help from the Kotlin slack channel. I'm impressed with the community that's built up around Kotlin already, and in its uptake in the Java world in general, as is evidenced by this game jam!

Spent a bit more time pottering with yon jam entry.

I now have a pretty good vertical slice of a game:

Start screen -> playing screen (with score and health) -> Game over screen

While all the parts are relatively basic, it means that even if I were to release now, there's kind of a game in there (albeit not a very good one). A minimum viable product if you will.

Now it's a case of adding features, and polishing what's currently there.

Applying Agile software principles to game development, oh yes.

Now got me some breaking up asteroids:

Added angular velocity to my movement/position systems

And the world turns!

Title screen actually looking like a title screen now, time to polish up the graphics I reckon.

Sometimes I find the interop between Kotlin and libGDX (Java really) a bit odd, but when it comes together, it really does make for a lot less boilerplate:

var firing = Texture(Assets.TURRET_ANIMATION)
var tmp = TextureRegion.split(firing, firing.width, firing.height/10)
var firingFrames = Array<TextureRegion>(10, { i -> tmp[i][0] })
var firingAnimation = Animation(0.02f, *firingFrames)

testAnim.add(AnimationComponent(firingAnimation))

Here I'm trying out animations using a sprite sheet. This works in this instance because I only have one column in the sheet, hence mapping it straight into a 1 dimensional array.

I struggled a little with the Animation constructor because I thought I needed a badlogic.Array, I had a Kotlin array and couldn't get them to play nice together. Turns out Animation will take a varargs TextureRegion as argument which Kotlin's spread (*) operator will let us do from an Array.

Neato!

So after a good initial start, I'm now at the point where everything is broken and horrible....yack...

I've been having problems with animation, and graphics. I'm not great at graphics work, but I'm giving it a go.

I'd decided to use Spriter Pro for animations, as I have a license for it and it gives me an excuse to try it, but I'm finding it a bit...dodgy...

I use Inkscape for all my graphic work, export as separate png's, import into Spriter, animate, export as sprite sheet png, import into libGDX and create an Animation. However Spriter seems to really mess up the image quality. I'm now exporting from Inkscape at 4 times the resolution I need, then scaling the final sprite sheet down in Gimp before importing into libGDX.

The other thing that bugs me is that Spriter doesn't seem to allow for any snapping/alignment, so everything is done by eye.

I only need pretty simple stuff, here's an example gif:

Either I'm missing something in Spriter, or I'm going about this the wrong way...

What does anyone else use for creating animations? Especially using graphics created in Inkscape ?

So I'm sticking with Spriter for now, and I'm done with the turret animation, spent way too much time on that...

Picked a nice new font though, and made a new logo:

Next I'm going to work on transitions between scenes, title to playing etc. Also started making some musics, using Caustic on Android.

Right, reckon I'm functionally complete now, time for a function freeze!

Should still have time to tidy up some of the graphics a bit more, and then balance gameplay.

The only thing I'm still not sure about is control, at the minute the turret/firing is keyboard controlled, the astronaut is mouse controlled. Which makes it a bit awkward...I was thinking of moving firing to the mouse, but I'd have to track the cursor with the turret which would probably make things too easy...will try and find a willing victim to try it out for me...

Probably won't have time to add in music though, not to worry, that was always last on the list.

Right I reckon that's it. I'm away at the weekend so I won't be able to do any more work then.

One last test of everything and then I'll release.

I'm relatively pleased with it, learnt a lot of new stuff, had fun taking part, so all good. Fingers crossed it doesn't just crash on other peoples machines!