First-rate devlog as always! Rain system looks very impressive and I think you made a good call on the shortened deck gun sequence. Hope your cat gets better!

Cool game! I was skeptical about how a "turn-based racing game" would work, but it does! It's like playing golf with a car instead of a ball. The art style and music is great and reminds me of the song "Pink Beetles in a Purple Zeppelin" by Arjen Lucassen.

Love the art style! What game engine or programming language are you using to make this?

I like the reflection on the title page as it gives a subtle indication of what the graphic style will be like (at least for the water effects). The game is looking fantastic!

Wow, very polished! Even the landing page! Great art style! Your UI/UX makes great use of bright colors, large fonts and outlined shapes. The difficulty was just about right -- not too hard and not too easy. I only had to start all over once. The only improvement I would recommend is a timer to let the player know how long the rainbow flasks stun them for. Really enjoyed this! Let me know if you need a play-tester for any future games of yours.

Your endless-runner with shooting mechanic game could be a good casual game for some people, although it would probably find more players on mobile than on desktop. No-code gamedev software like Hyperpad could easily recreate this for mobile and tablet platforms.

That is one fancy Yugo because the one I drove back in college didn't have a radio or air conditioning!

Nice to see you're still making games! The concept was a bit confusing at first but once I started playing I got the hang of it pretty quick. The art style, sound effects and music are all great and glad to see you still have that same sense of humor. I liked seeing all the different types of Gregories in the game. I also liked how sometimes they said different things.

The gameplay is pretty unique but also a bit on the tedious side. I had to sail around for quite a bit to afford 4 guns. It is so much easier to collect money by finding barrels than fighting long sea battles. 

The different map regions are nice and add some variety. I'm not sure if I beat the game or not. I found this hellish map and beat the boss fort in the middle of a keyhole-looking passage. 

The dice-based combat is interesting, especially the part where cannons can blow up if you get too greedy (or unlucky). And I especially liked that this logic was the same for the enemy (otherwise it would have been really unfair). I had to have a 4-gun ship with 300 health before I could beat the game. Winning ship and fort battles feels more like a game of luck than skill. Maybe have an upgrade where you can buy cannons that can't blow up? 

More keyboard controls would be nice, because you only use spacebar for rolling all dice, but have to use mouse for everything else.

Being able to play in browser and go full-screen was a nice touch.

Overall, pretty fun game and worth expanding if the ship and fort battles can be made a little less tedious.

Love the ambience of "tokyo"!

Thanks Spacepiano, happy to be of encouragement!

There certainly is a nice simplicity to paper that makes it good for a variety of gamedev situations. I keep a pile of scratch paper on my desk. 

Blast your way through the enemy drones in this top-down space shooter programmed in QBasic.

Full game is free.

No AI assets.

No Microtransactions.

No DLC.

Source Code available for purchase.

Click here to play SCRAPSHIP!

24 AUG 2024:

SCRAPSHIP

IS

DONE!

Whew! What  to say?  It's always been one of my "bucket-list" goals to make my own game. Thankfully technology has gotten to the point where it is completely viable to make a video game on your home computer.  But what really got me started was finding a thumbstick with some of my old QBasic programs I made in High School . . . nearly 20 years ago. Then I found that there was a newer version of QBasic, called QB64, that allowed one to run their old code on newer machines. That was a game changer! After that, I found an excellent Youtube QBasic series by SchoolFreeware that covered all the new QB64 features. The final project in that series? A Space Invaders clone. That was enough to get me thinking about the capabilities of QB64 . . . and what I could potentially do with it.

Development started early 2020, just before the pandemic. Released a couple demos where I was just toying around with different ideas. Started the whole project over once or twice.  It took over 4 years -- but keep in mind I was only working on it an hour a day unless I was sick, on vacation or on one of my many business trips.

Scrapship is far from a perfect game . . . and there are LOTS of things that could be improved on, but I am proud of what I was able to accomplish. Some of which I would deem rather complex (for QBasic at least). For me, the most remarkable thing is that I even finished it, because the truth is that Scrapship was never my dream game. A cool game, sure, but not my dream game. The secret to staying dedicated to a project for such a long time is consistency. Small doses of it, in my case.  Motivational sticky quotes help.

But now that it's done, I'm super excited about the future of 40wattstudio. For one, I just got accepted to WGU (Western Governor's University) where I will be pursuing my bachelor's in Software Engineering (C# path). This is mostly to increase my employment chances as I'm currently unemployed. In my spare time, I'm looking forward to working on some "dream game" projects I have in mind.  I won't share too much, but I've always liked Skyrim (and its incredible mod support) and I've poured countless hours into various versions of Civilization. So something along those lines. 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Dreams are watered by hard work."

Thanks to everyone for their support over the past few years and for making this one of the most-viewed Devlogs here on Itch.io! Have a great rest of your week!

17 AUG 2024:

- Adjusted final boss so that it needs to have both guns destroyed before it can take damage. This makes it a little more challenging because it was way too easy to beat earlier.

- Added a brief animation when the final boss appears (it warps in the same way that some of the cruisers do).

- Improved battleship and carrier spawning/despawning.

- FIxed an issue with the galaxy background not scaling properly.

- Added difficulty settings -- Easy, normal and hard. This is based on the strength of your weapons. Easy = 2x more powerful. Normal = 1x power, Hard = 1/2 power.

- Biggest milestone this week though was going through all 13,000+ lines of code and adding/removing comments. Was also able to find ways to simplify some of the code by consolidating several IF . . . THEN statements.

- Game will be released sometime this August!

- The full game will be 100% free. No ads and no microtransactions.

- Apart from the initial download, no internet connection is required to play Scrapship. I love offline games.

- No AI was used in making Scrapship . Everything is made by humans.

- Full source code will be available for purchase for people interested in modding or programming. Apart from donations, this is the only way the game will be monetized. Let me reiterate again that the full game is 100% free.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"We don't stop playing because we get old . . . we get old because we stop playing!"

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

10 AUG 2024:

- Got some good feedback this week from one of my early playtesters. Good to hear that Scrapship seems to be working fine on other computers and -- most importantly -- no game-crashing bugs. 

- Game will be released sometime this August!

- The full game will be 100% free. No ads and no microtransactions.

- Apart from the initial download, no internet connection is required to play Scrapship. I love offline games.

- No AI was used in making Scrapship . Everything is made by humans.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"There is no hard way around hard work. Embrace it." -- Roger Federer

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

If the end goal is a Skyrim clone, then I would recommend that all subsequent clones also be in the same vein. Super Mario Bros is a "simpler" project, but doesn't have much in common. I would suggest a classic Text Adventure as that would give you practice with the branching paths and complex dialogue trees.

Love this one!

I have too many favorite quotes to list just one, but the one I used today on my Scrapship devlog was this one:

“Consistency is what transforms average into excellence.”

Thanks Aim studios! Looking forward to wrapping this project up so I can start a new one!

3 AUG 2024:

Playtesting continues. Expecting to release the game sometime this August!

- The full game will be 100% free. No ads and no microtransactions.

- Apart from the initial download, no internet connection is required to play Scrapship. I love offline games.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

“Consistency is what transforms average into excellence.”

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

27 JUL 2024:

- Not much to report on my end, just minor changes and tweaks here and there. For the most part I’m just waiting for feedback from early playtesters to see if there are any last-minute bugs or changes that need to be implemented.  So I don’t exactly want to call Scrapship done, but it pretty much is. Unless some major game-breaking bug pops up or something you can expect to see it by the end of August!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

“If people are not laughing at your goals, your goals are too small.” — Azim Premji

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

20 JUL 2024:

- Made quite a few last-minute fixes to the game. Some of the levels were noticeably laggy and the level transitions themselves weren't my favorite. But in the end I think it's better to have a smooth and consistent gameplay experience -- even if it means removing pretty graphics. So I removed the skybox backgrounds and the performance is vastly improved -- no more lag! There are still background objects (stars, asteroids, planets). I might add a couple more small objects in for variety.

- The asteroid field in particular got a complete overhaul. Instead of using an asteroid skybox, I procedurally created my own and the final result looks very good!

- Reworked all the level transitions so that one level seamlessly blends into the next.

- I'm finally happy with the AI.

- The game is more fun than I thought it was last week. You can stay around and shoot down the enemies or almost play it like an endless runner and avoid most of them.

- Added voiceovers.

- As far as running the game on my PC is concerned, the game is probably 99% complete -- a couple bug fixes and maybe some more background objects, but that's all.

- Tested Scrapship on my son's laptop and the experience is the same for the most part -- there are some bugs that need addressing, but nothing game-breaking.

- Scrubbed the code to fix some inconsistencies and bugs.

- Looking forward to finishing this thing!!!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Find radical joy in the hardest of pursuits." -- Eva zu Beck

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

13 JUL 2024:

- Battleships and carriers deactivate if off-screen for a certain amount of time. This also fixed a bug where  level 5 never triggered.

- Continued working on AI system. It's getting closer to where I want it to be.

- Fixed game-freezing bugs and glitches related to the pause screen.  The game could only be paused by stopping all the code that made things move. A truckload of boolean checks took care of this, but was causing all kinds of weird graphical glitches. Next I tried a different approach and made a special subroutine that would only display the objects, but even that experiment was all kinds of buggy. Ultimately I went with a much simpler pause screen to avoid getting rid of it altogether.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence." -- Vince Lombardi

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

6 JULY 2024:

Lots of progress on a variety of things. Also doing lots of playtesting to see if anything is broken or needs adjusting.

ADDITIONS:

- New galaxy backgrounds to level 4 to make it feel less empty (see screenshot above).

- Galaxy scrolls in and out during level transitions.

CHANGES:

- Only one carrier spawns at a time now to prevent overlap and lag.

- Reorganized hit detection code based on current level.

- Black hole speeds away faster when final boss destroyed.

OTHER: 

- Copied the contents of this entire devlog (minus comments) to Word so that there is an offline version.

BUG FIXES:

- Shield down animation restart glitch when hit with single laser.

- Battleship 225 image misalignment between the top and bottom segments.

- Objects not pausing on pause screen.

A big thanks to everyone for helping this devlog to reach 20,000 views!!! As I was copying the devlog to Word I was also moved by all the supportive comments over the past 4 years. 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"You only fail when you stop trying."

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

29 JUNE 2024:

Lots of minor additions and fixes this week as the game is very near completion:

- After beating the game, player will get to see a stat screen showing how many enemies they destroyed.

- Battleships deactivate if they are a certain distance off-screen.

- Carrier fighters are slightly brighter for better color contrast.

- Cargo boss can scroll down the screen faster if the player flies forward. 

- Deleted about 400 lines of code by simplifying types and removing unused variables.

- Fixed bugs where objects kept moving when the game was paused. 

- Fixed bug where stars were not scrolling properly.

Still the occasional graphical glitch here and there, but so far haven't encountered anything game-breaking or that would cause an unfair player death. AI still needs some work and I need to verify the game still works at different resolutions.

I happened to see that Space Engine Pro (what I've been using for my space backgrounds) just got a new update where you take high resolution screenshots. Although it's tempting to take advantage of this I know it's just going to cause lag because I've already had to scale down or use lower resolution versions of some of the graphics.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Don't wait for the right opportunity, create it."

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

22 JUNE 2024:

- Finished level transitions.

- Cargo boss stays in bounds when scrolling on screen.

- Added a timer that determines how long each level is. 

- The entire game can be played from start to finish with the exception of some sort of transition to the credits roll and a few other minor things to fix. I certainly don't plan on adding anything new at this point, just adjusting things as they are. 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Challenges are what make life interesting, and overcoming them is what makes like meaningful." -- Joshua J. Marine

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

Afraid that typos and grammar errors are scaring people away from your Visual Novel or RPG?

Need help making your story more concise so players don't get bored?

I love to see games improve and I would love for yours to be one of them! 

Idle-clicker Numeric Demon Cat and action RPG Echo are two of the most recent projects I've worked on.

If the project is small enough, I will probably do it for free. 

Payment for larger projects is negotiable -- I'm an indie dev too so I know that your budget may be limited to what you can find under the couch cushions. I will work with you to find a fee that's fair. If I really like your game, a free copy may be sufficient.

Currently unemployed so I'll have plenty of time to focus on your editing/localization needs!

Contact me at: 40wattstudio@gmail.com

15 JUNE 2024:

- The game now keeps track of how much scrap you've destroyed. Added a scrap counter to the stats screen.

- Levels only transition when X amount of enemies have been destroyed and all scrap is off screen.

- Enemies now reset between levels.

- Cargo boss only appears when X amount of enemies have been destroyed. After this, it slowly scrolls down the screen and limits player movement to the X axis. When the Cargo boss is entirely on-screen there is now a slight pause before triggering the animation that starts the boss fight. 

- Fixed bug where Cargo boss was being destroyed prematurely.

- Fixed bug where player damage wasn't being persisted between levels.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Seek what sets your soul on fire."

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

Thanks TheMetalCarrotDev! Looking forward to finishing this project soon so I can start something new!

8 JUNE 2024:

- Lots of progress this week, probably bringing Scrapship the closest it’s ever been to being released! I’m actually taking it to a friend’s house this weekend to have him try an early version of it.

- Fixed the load issues by scaling down some of the background images to 1/4 of their original size. Load times are now consistently between 6 and 10 seconds. 

- Infinite foreground asteroids in level 3.

- Added a new star background to the 4th level. This will allow me to spawn larger enemies without causing lag. 

- Increased final boss health to make it more difficult.

- Cargo boss now scrolls down the screen when triggered.

- Lots of bug fixes (and thankfully none of these were game-crashing ones). 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” — Steve Jobs

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

1 JUN 2024:

- Made some good progress on the AI this week. In the picture above you can see the player engaging a bunch of different enemies, including a battleship. There is a nice sense of unpredictability as to which enemy will show up next. 

The game handles the smaller enemies well enough, but I am noticing lag once the battleship (or any larger enemy) goes active. So to fix that, I'll have to find ways to trim down image sizes (most likely the level backgrounds) and/or spawn larger enemies when there isn't much activity going on. It's a balancing act between fps and difficulty.

Right now the logic goes something like this: Every time an enemy goes active, the spawn timer increases. Every time an enemy goes inactive by being destroyed or going off screen, the spawn timer decreases. Then on top of this there is a calculation based on how much damage the player has sustained. The game gets a little easier the more damage you take.

- I changed the outline of the scrap to red instead of green. My reasoning for this is because scrap can damage you and green almost invites the player to fly into it! So instead I tried a red outline, which communicates the dangerous aspect of the scrap better, but admittedly doesn't have quite the color contrast as green did. I probably just need to thicken the outline a little and it should be ok.

- Battleships can now flank the player if there is more than one. This also prevents the battleships from spawning on top of or too close to each other. 

- Fixed some more game freezing bugs involving shield fighters and bombers. Every now and then I'll see some other bugs but I'm not going to worry about them too much unless they actually cause the game to freeze or crash.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Challenge yourself; it's the only path which leads to growth." -- Morgan Freeman

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

25 MAY 2024:

- Added a spawn timer for enemies. What's unique about this is that it adjusts based on player performance. If the player is doing really well (not taking damage, destroying lots of enemies, etc), then enemies will spawn sooner. But if the player is doing poorly (taking damage) then the enemies will spawn less frequently. This mechanic essentially gets rid of the need for "difficulty levels" since they are adjusted in-game automatically. Still need to work on refining this.

- Fixed a bug where the carriers had a missing frame of animation causing the game to glitch out.

- Fixed a bug where the cruisers caused the game to get stuck in an endless loop. Thank God for log files or I would have never figured this one out!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"A negative mind will never give you a positive life."

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

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!