20 NOV 2021:
- Quite a bit of progress this week! In the GIF above you can see several new features in action:
- The moving stars in the background
- The rocket plumes on they player ship
- The enemy shields flickering as they take damage (a little hard to see because of the GIF quality)
- And most recent, a cool shield explosion effect I made using BlastFX (available on Steam).
- Started working on cards that tell the player a little bit about the different enemies and what strategies to use against them. Below is a sample:
- I also created some explosion animations using some free samples from Embergen. But there is a slight problem, for some reason Blender glitches out after the third frame tries to render. I updated my Nvidia drivers and that didn't work. Thankfully I have a Mac Mini so hopefully I can render the images there and move them back to my Windows machine.
- BlastFX is nice and somewhat simple, but there's no doubt that the effects that can be created by Embergen software are much more impressive visually. I'm currently trying their 14-day free trial (which allows you to do everything but export files). I haven't pulled the trigger on buying the software yet, but if I do, I might be doing some upgrades to all the explosions in the game.
- Check out the new website for 40wattstudio! I'll be honest, my first attempt at a Squarespace site was pretty awful. So I spent a couple days and now have a website that is simpler and also serves as a landing page for Scrapship. In the future I plan on writing a monthly blog post about something gamedev or software related.
This week is Thanksgiving so I will have very limited gamedev time. I will probably spend most of that with Embergen to make the most of the trial period.
I am very thankful to all my readers and followers on this long-term project! Even a simple upvote or like on a post does a lot to keep me motivated.
Two from Itch.io that I want to give shoutouts to are
All of us had projects going about the same time (early 2020) and their feedback has been extremely valuable. Sepi has made some amazing Game Jam games and TheSneak is currently working on a very ambitious Earthbound-like RPG that involves cats . . . and aliens.
Quote of the week:
"Judge the worth of an activity by how you will feel when you are done, not by how it feels at the moment."
Thanks for reading and have a good rest of your week and a Happy Thanksgiving!