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18 MAY 2024: 

- This week saw a lot of minor refinements across the board, with the big end result being that I'm now in a "good enough" place to start working on levels. Maybe a minor bug here and there -- but that I'm aware of -- nothing game-crashing. There are always improvements that can be made, so I'm doing my best to squash my perfectionistic tendencies.

- Minor hit box adjustments for all enemies  -- mostly for animation purposes. 

- Fixed a long-standing bug where some of the shield fighters would overlap when in formation. 

- Shield fighters now have 5 different formation types.

- Started placing enemies in their respective levels.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"You not believing in yourself is a tragedy. Stop that."

Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!

11 MAY 2024:

- Simplified the explosion animation function and fixed a bug that was causing the game to crash when 2 different explosions were on screen simultaneously.

- Trimmed the rest of the level backgrounds. This brings the initial load time down from ~9 seconds to ~7 seconds.

- Adjusted the explosion animation coordinates for the satellite and shield fighters.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail." -- Edwin H. Land

Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!

4 MAY 2024:

- Almost done implementing a new way for explosions to be handled in the game. Previously, each enemy type could only show one type of explosion. Now, each enemy  can explode up to 7 different ways, along with rotation and scaling variations. Makes the space combat look much more dynamic! Also, explosions have some logic to them so that weapons like the more powerful scrap cannon will always show larger explosions than weaker weapons. As you can see in the gif above, I still need to work on the hit detection a little so that explosions show up directly over the object instead of at the very edge of it.

- Reduced game load time to about 9 seconds (was 12 previously.) Because I can now scale explosion animations, I reduced the default size of some of the larger ones and also removed empty and excessive frames. 

- Trimmed some of the level backgrounds. Some of these were originally 3k pixels by 2k pixels or larger, so making some of these smaller by removing extra black space has also helped give a performance increase.

IN OTHER NEWS:

The BASIC programming language turns 60!  For those of you new to this devlog, one of the oddities of this project is that it is being written entirely in a modern version of BASIC called QB64PE. As you can tell by the 4+ years I've been working on this project, writing your own code is quite the challenge, but you end up learning so much more about actual game development than if you had just used a game engine. While most people associate BASIC with primitive text adventures and ugly pixel graphics, one of my goals with Scrapship has been to show how awesome the language can be for game development.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Don't count the days. Make the days count."

Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!

27 APR 2024:

- Carriers can spawn in a variety of formations.

- Cargo boss AI is done. Also fixed some bugs:

•  Explosions were in the background instead of the foreground.
• Cargo boss "jittered" after becoming active.

- Final boss AI is done. Right now I'm making some changes to HP values and how different weapons react to different segments.

IN OTHER NEWS:

When doing a long project like a video game, it's a good idea to have smaller goals to work towards. For example, earlier this year I learned about this  Conqueror app (non-affiliated) and I've found that it's really good for motivating me to get outside more and exercise. I started the Great Wall of China virtual challenge in late January and just finished yesterday -- 161 miles in 90 days. Besides the health benefits of walking regularly, working towards short-term goals like this help you to stay consistent and remind you what success feels like. 

I also noticed that walking regularly helped clear my mind and gave me great opportunities to think about problems encountered while working on Scrapship. 

Some good ideas for other short-term goals: Reading a book, watching all the videos of a certain YT series,  getting a certification or degree -- anything whose completion can give you a great sense of accomplishment can help you stay motivated  on longer projects. 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"The fears you don't face become your limits."

Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!

20 APR 2024:

- Cruisers can spawn in a variety of formations (down, left to right, right to left and cross pattern)

- Battleships can spawn in a variety of formations. 

- Also tested scaling works properly by running the game on a 7" display.

- Tried out Geogen to see what it was capable of in regards to creating planet graphics, but it's still very primitive (only version 0.2). There was a very promising program called Space Fabricator by Imphenzia, but it appears that the software is no longer available. 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan." -- Tim Cain

Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!

13 APR 2024:

- Started working on the movement/AI! 

• Shield fighters spawn in a variety of formations
• Bombers swoop in and spawn in a variety of formations
• Cruisers spawn in a variety of formations (in progress)

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"The most valuable thing you can make is a mistake -- you can't learn anything from being perfect." -- Adam Osborne

Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!

6 APR 2024:

- Final boss is done! I also managed to improve some of the hit detection.

- The single laser has some new functionality! It is the only weapon in the game that can be used to shoot down bombs, whether they're fired from bombers or even the final boss! 

- Now that the enemies are done I can start working on the AI!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

Your focus determines your reality.

Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!

30 MAR 2024:

- Cargo boss is done! This includes scaling. 

- Final boss can be drawn to screen, take damage and shoot lasers. Currently working on the bomb attack it has.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Finding opportunity is a matter of believing it's there." -- Barbara Corcoran

Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!

Hey kotofey124 . . . Getting dumped is one of the worst feelings in the world. Take some time to process it all and hold off on making any important decisions (especially new relationships) until a good while after. When you're feeling better you can try a different approach to what you're trying to do with your game/channel.

If you get really down make sure to dial 988.

23 MAR 2024:

- Cargo boss is pretty much done but needs testing to make sure the scaling works on different screen resolutions. After this I'll be able to start work on getting the final boss added back into the game!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"A game for everyone is a game for no one." -- Arrowhead Game Studios

Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!

16 MAR 2024:

Got back from my business trip a little bit early! Saw the winter weather in the forecast for Colorado Springs  and said "nope!" Apparently a lot of other people had the same idea. 

- This allowed me to get a little bit of work done on my return. I've started putting the Cargo Ship boss back into the game. So far it's mostly a matter of copy and paste, but there are a few minor glitches I need to iron out. If all goes well I should have it done by next week.

- Ever wonder who 40wattstudio is? Well wonder no more because I made a version of myself in Dragon's Dogma 2 Character Creator (free on Steam!)

Even with all the customizability, I'd say it's about 80% accurate. Needs to look about 10-20 years older and slightly less hair on top. And there was no option for glasses (or any other accessories).

Anybody else play around with the DD2CC? I think it's pretty cool and a great way to get people into the game before it comes out.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Create with the heart. Build with the mind." -- Criss Jami

Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!

9 MAR 2024:

Still on my business trip so no Scrapship updates, but I am looking forward to getting back so I can finish it up. 

I’ll be changing jobs in the near future, but this shouldn’t affect development of Scrapship as I only need an hour a day to work on it.  If I’m unemployed I’ll probably work on it even more — it’d be a nice break from job hunting and studying for IT certifications.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

“Excuses are the nails used to build a house of failure.” — Jim Rohn

Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!

2 MAR 2024:

- I have a business trip the next two weeks, so I challenged myself to finish the carriers before I have to go. 

- Carriers are done! I made some pretty significant changes to them this time around.  The up and down carriers were being problematic so I removed them completely. For at least one of them, I would have had to rework the original Blender files to fix some issues and that would have taken who-knows-how-long.

- Carrier fighters can attack from up to 4 different directions. I wasn't entirely pleased with the old carrier fighter logic, so I created this new attack method for them which is much less math-intensive. And in my opinion it's a lot more interesting and fun.

- Scrapship is currently up to 11000 lines of code. There is only about 3000 lines of code left to transfer over and reintegrate. 

- As for my sticky note on my monitor, the only things I have left are "Cargo Boss", "Final Boss", "AI" and "Other". 

- 12 of the 16 sticky note tasks have been completed, so I'm about 75% done.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"That's what games are, in the end. Teachers." -- Ralph Koster

Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!

Hi FearCode! I'm admittedly inexperienced when it comes to benchmarking programming languages so thanks for the insights! Not exactly sure how I would implement an MD5 solver, but I saw on YT that another benchmark method is to see how many "passes" a programming language can make in 5 seconds when solving for all prime numbers. 

According to its creator,  "The QB64 compiler converts BASIC code into C++ code, and then uses a third-party C++ compiler (GCC) to compile the C++ code into an executable file."

For now I'm pretty happy with QB64, mostly because it's what I'm familiar with and pretty easy to work with. But if I need something blazing fast I'll definitely be checking out those low-level languages. I've played around with C++ a little bit, but I'd have to really dedicate some time to get to a point where I can work with it.

24 FEB 2024

- Two of the four carriers are now back in the game.

- Restructuring the carrier code so all 4 types can use it.

SIDE NOTES:

This week I found some interesting YT videos about programming language speed, like Assembly vs C++ vs Python. It's amazing how much slower some high-level languages can be when tasked to run a "simple" task like counting to a billion. There were no "speed test" videos for QB64 (QBasic) though, so I made a little program to see how long it would take QB64 to count to 1 billion:

If I run it without printing to the screen, QB64 can finish it in 2.197 seconds. But if I uncomment my PRINT statement it takes considerably longer: 7.6 minutes!

I think speed tests like these are good for understanding what your programming language is capable of so you can pick the right language for the right project. Imagine programming a complex game like Dwarf Fortress in Python!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"A comfort zone is a beautiful place, but nothing ever grows there."

Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!

Nice effect! I especially like the guy flying out into space afterwards.

17 FEB 2024:

- The first of 4 types of carriers is now back in the game. So far it looks like I'll be able to use trimmed carrier graphics for a slight performance boost.

- Tested the battleships on my son's laptop and ensured that scaling works properly.

- Scrapship enters its 4th year of development! I never would have thought I'd be working on a "simple shmup" this long! But to keep things in perspective, I only do an hour of gamedev a day, excluding vacations, illness and business trips. Regardless, it is still a challenge to stay dedicated to a single project for so long. You might be wondering, does he ever feel like this?

And the answer would be "Yes, quite often!" I have a "dream game" idea that's been in my head for a while now that I'm eager to get started on. But besides all the motivational quotes I surround myself with, there is a particular meme that has been very helpful in staying focused . . .

QUOTE  MEME OF THE WEEK: (One of my favorites)

Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!

10 FEB 2024:

- All the battleship code is back in the game. They can now be damaged and destroyed, as well as damage and destroy the player.

- Fixed a bug where the battleship gun explosions didn't stay aligned with the ship.

- Added all the variables required to make the battleship scale at different screen resolutions.

- Right now I'm thinking that the battleship needs to be strictly a "deep space" enemy against a minimalist background to keep the framerate up.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Let's optimize for player experience rather than what we think will make more money." -- Ron Carmel

Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!

3 FEB 2024:

If you look at last week's GIF, you'll notice that the forward gun "jumps" when it fires. This was a bug I noticed just after I posted my devlog. As it turns out, this bug was present in several other firing positions as well. I tried manually adjusting the coordinates and still couldn't get it to line up or display properly. I'm sure if I kept at it I'd figure it out, but troubleshooting it was taking quite a bit of time. In the end, I decided to revert back to the old battleship code and untrimmed images. One step back, two steps forward . . . 

- All 4 battleships draw to the screen and fire correctly. No "jumping" bugs.

- After doing some tests, I concluded that the trimmed battleship images didn't really improve performance all that much. Trimmed and untrimmed versions of the battleship still exhibit noticeable lag. But the real cause of this is not so much the battleship as the background which covers the whole screen and is drawn every iteration. So I might have to regulate the larger enemies like the battleships and carriers to "deep space" levels where the background is mostly black with no large background images to process. 

- To finish the battleships, I need to re-add the code for damage and make sure some of the animations still work.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Opportunity is a haughty goddess who wastes no time with those who are unprepared." -- George Clason

Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!

27 JAN 2024:

- The first of four types of battleships is mostly back in the game. It can be drawn to screen and both guns can move and fire.  Lots of coordinates! I keep a stack of scratch paper for writing all the values down after I get them from Aseprite:

Then I have to program all that into the game:

Then I test it to see if it works properly:

Now I just got to do that workflow for the other 3 types of battleships and add the damage code back in.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often." -- Winston Churchill

Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!

Love the concept! Great sense of humor. I've never seen a solid state/liquid state game mechanic in a platformer before. It is certainly innovative, but also frustrating. Because the transitions take a couple seconds, it can initially be hard to tell if you're transitioning to or from a state. In the liquid state, it's also hard to tell where the center is.

I don't play a lot of games on Itch, but the title of yours was certainly attention-grabbing!

20 JAN 2024:

- Finished adding the cruisers back into the game. 

- Created a new cruiser explosion animation. 

- Started working on the battleships. This is going to be tedious. As you can see from the screenshot above, just one battleship has a dizzying number of gun sprites to cover all the different firing positions and states. As with all the previous enemies, I huge change here will be the fact that I'm trimming all of the images to save space.

Above is one of the guns before trimming. As you can see there's a lot of wasted space above and left.  The real benefit to keeping it like this is that it allows me to place the image using just one x,y coordinate.  For all the guns in the first screenshot, I have to use Aseprite to get the updated coordinates which I'll then have to update in the code so they draw correctly. Hopefully I'll be able to draw more than one battleship to the screen without losing fps. The last build of Scrapship could handle one battleship but lagged with the addition of any other enemies.

I'll see how the "trimmed" battleships work, but if I deem it impractical then I'll revert to my original files (in the ORIG folder) and go with that.

- Also updated my version of Aseprite to 1.3.2. You can update Aseprite by going to their website.

- You can get spend a lot of time trying to make an explosion in Embergen -- especially if you're doing it from scratch. But a quick and effective workaround I've found is this: Take one of the presets and view the explosion from top-down instead of making an animation of the default camera angle. Then change some of the values to your needs.  This allowed me to make the cruiser explosion in less than an hour.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Those who keep learning will keep rising in life." -- Charlie Munger

Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!

Thanks Trisani Studios!

13 JAN 2024:

- Bombers and bombs are finished.

- Started adding the Cruisers back in.  Almost done with that. Just this morning I was working on getting the attack animations to work again. 

- On the sticky note on my monitor I have 7 more TO-DOs before I can call the game done:

• Cruisers
• Battleships
• Carriers
• Cargo Boss
• Final Boss
• AI (for all enemies)
• Other (voiceovers, gamepad support? minor adjustments, bugs, playtesting, etc) 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Always do what you are afraid to do." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!

6 JAN 2024:

- All-new bomber explosion which you can see at the very end of the gif above!

- Added back in most of the bomber code. The bombers above don't move as they're still in a testing phase while I work some bugs out.

The 5th BASIC Game Jam had some really good entries! My favorite two were a puzzle game called TapOut and a side-scrolling endless runner called Ruins of Zeugma.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin." -- Ivan Turgenev

Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!

It's a bit apples to oranges, but your game idea reminds me of a Playstation game I played  . . . a long time ago . . . called Mister Mosquito. Except in that one you were the mosquito and not the human. Anyways, looking forward to seeing how your project works out! 

You're welcome! It's the least I can do since I'm too busy to enter my own submission.

GAMEPLAY 5/5 This was my favorite game of this Game Jam and let me start by saying that I usually hate puzzle games. I got to level 10. Can play in browser. Loved the Example level to learn how to play. 

CREATIVITY 5/5 Creative puzzle game.

GRAPHICS, SOUND AND POLISH 5/5 Simple but effective graphics, calming sound, very polished interface! 

INTERPRETATION OF THEME AND COMPLETENESS OF GAME 4/5 Good use of BLOCKS theme but game doesn't have an ending screen after you hit the last block on level 10.

GAMEPLAY 5/5 This was my second favorite game of this Game Jam! Really fun tapping-style game (The one-button gameplay reminds me a little of Roach Race in Cyberpunk 2077). Can play in browser. Liked full screen. Liked how the levels had vertical space to work with. I made it to the end of the level and restarted a few times for the fun of it.

CREATIVITY 3/5 Pretty creative one-button runner-type game.

GRAPHICS, SOUND AND POLISH 5/5 Good animations, sound and controls were good.

INTERPRETATION OF THEME AND COMPLETENESS OF GAME 5/5 Good use of RUIN theme.   

GAMEPLAY 4/5 Pretty good puzzle game. Fairly intuitive. Has instructions. Full screen. I beat the game (end of level 8). Doesn't always  make sense why the lemming-like characters can walk over air or why they choose to go one direction instead of another when both are equally possible.

CREATIVITY 5/5 Lots of variation and can move, destroy or create blocks.

GRAPHICS, SOUND AND POLISH 3/5 good graphics with basic animations, basic sound, no music.

INTERPRETATION OF THEME AND COMPLETENESS OF GAME 5/5 Uses BLOCKS theme.

GAMEPLAY 3/5 Good turn-based gameplay. simple controls (controls were not explained but easy to figure out). Supports two players. Beat the game.

CREATIVITY 4/5 Pretty creative puzzle game.

GRAPHICS, SOUND AND POLISH 2/5 Basic graphics, sound and interface

INTERPRETATION OF THEME AND COMPLETENESS OF GAME 5/5 Uses BLOCKS theme. Can beat the game. 

GAMEPLAY 3/5 Good but repetitive. Easy controls. Feels like a boss fight from a larger game. Beat it in 90.45 seconds. Auto-attack reminds me of Vampire Survivors sorta. 

CREATIVITY 2/5 Basic boss fight.

GRAPHICS, SOUND AND POLISH 4/5 Good animations and has shadows (sorta), has sound (but repetitive).

INTERPRETATION OF THEME AND COMPLETENESS OF GAME 5/5 Uses ONE ENEMY theme and can be beat. 

GAMEPLAY 2/5 Game is way too easy once you figure out you can just punch the base of the snake. Can only punch and jump and controls were not obvious at all. "C" and "X" buttons should have been mapped to something else like up arrow and spacebar. I did like fullscreen mode. I beat the game.

CREATIVITY 3/5 I haven't seen many Mayan themed games.

GRAPHICS, SOUND AND POLISH 3/5 Good color contrast, large sprites, has sound, no instructions, music doesn't fit theme, good animations.

INTERPRETATION OF THEME AND COMPLETENESS OF GAME 5/5 Uses all 3 themes.

GAMEPLAY 2/5 Enemy AI is very random (lots of waiting to get to certain areas). Simple, intuitive gameplay. Beat the game. Can play in browser.

CREATIVITY 3/5 Pretty standard top-down dungeon game, but I liked the creative narrative about the developer's experience with different game engines and programming languages.

GRAPHICS, SOUND AND POLISH 3/5 Good slime animations and has sound but lots of spelling/grammar errors.

INTERPRETATION OF THEME AND COMPLETENESS OF GAME 5/5 Game has a complete ending and uses the RUIN theme

GAMEPLAY 2/5 Bloody hard and it's not very clear what the red diagonal was supposed to symbolize. A successful hit? Damage taken? I did not beat this game. I liked how you could play in browser and had instructions. 

CREATIVITY 3/5 Pretty basic top-down dungeon game.

GRAPHICS, SOUND AND POLISH 2/5 Good music but basic graphics (no animations),.

INTERPRETATION OF THEME AND COMPLETENESS OF GAME 5/5 uses ONE ENEMY theme. And I guess you could say it kinda takes place in a RUIN with BLOCKS as well.

30 DEC 2023:

- Started adding the bombers back into the game. All 4 types are assembled and drawn correctly and can also be damaged. 

- Fixed a graphical inconsistency where part of the bomber tail section would be floating unattached to anything if the middle segment was damaged while the wings were intact. 

- I forgot to mention this last week, but this devlog just passed 15,000 views. Thanks to everyone who has read, liked and/or commented over the years! 

- Scrapship is made using QB64PE, a modern version of the QBasic programming language. If you're interested in the QBasic programming language -- or just want to try some retro-style games --  check out the 5th QBasic Game Jam which is wrapping up soon. Although I'm always asked to participate, I usually don't since that would detract from my progress on Scrapship. But it is fun to play and rate the games and see what other people can do.

PLANS FOR NEXT YEAR:

I really want next year to be the year that I finish Scrapship. I was hoping it would be this year, but my job has a lot of business trips that take time away from game development. So  we'll see how it goes, although there is also a big possibility that I'll be changing jobs next year as well. Either way, I'll keep chipping away at this project until it's done. 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"It's never too early to think about performance." -- Rebecca Parsons

Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week and a HAPPY NEW YEAR!

23 DEC 2023:

- Now that the bomber sprites are all trimmed, I started putting the code back in so they appear in the game. Originally I was using a scale function to draw them, but found that the trimmed sprites have major coordinate issues. Basically none of the bomber segments were aligning properly and just looked like a jumbled mess. Really didn’t want to spend all week troubleshooting that so I took an alternate route where I just draw the sprites to the screen directly with _PUTIMAGE. 

- Not a whole lot of progress this week and next . . . but progress nonetheless!

IN OTHER NEWS:

Godzilla Minus One is a lot of fun to watch! Until yesterday I hadn’t been to a movie theater since before Covid. 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

“First do it, then do it right, then do it fast.” — Addy Osmani

Thanks for reading and have a Merry CHRISTmas!

Thanks BlueJumperFox, glad you like it!

16 DEC 2023:

- Trimmed and logged coordinates for the bomber graphics. Originally the bomber sprites took up 3MB, now they only take up 1MB!

BEFORE:

AFTER:

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Software and cathedrals are much the same -- first we build them, then we pray." -- Samuel T. Redwine Jr.

Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!

9 DEC 2023:

- Scrap is not just a threat to the player, but to your enemies as well! I think this is a nice touch in the name of consistency. It would be weird if scrap hurt you and not the enemy ships. 

- If you look at the right-most shield fighter, you can see a new explosion effect I made in Embergen. 

Some notes on the gif above:

- Enemies aren't moving because it's easier to test them for hit detection when they're stationary. Movement will be added later when I do the AI.

- This is what the full game screen will look like (hopefully not that small though, although I have tested it on a 7" monitor.) Ideally you'll have a 32" widescreen monitor.

- Very minimal UI and what UI elements you do see will be integrated into the environment. Above you can (kinda) see 2 of them: The orange dot on the player ship indicating what weapon is currently selected and the green outlines of the scrap indicating when they are a threat to the player. 

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

Sharing two that I just read in StephanRewind's excellent Atlantic '41 blog here on Itch.

". . . a good composition always alludes to something more, outside the boundaries of the canvas."

". . . you make a game for other players too, and you can't always assume that they'll play it as you intended."

Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!