I regret not putting more time into keyboard controls. It would have been fast to implement and it seems many of you would have enjoyed it better. Awch!
We are now at the midpoint of the jam and I have forgot to update the DevLog. Sorry for that! Will be updating every 2-3 days from now on until the end.
Over the last two weeks I've been silently doing a lot of work. My friend comes over my place to help sometimes, but he has been kind of busy with life stuff.
First of all, the game is now defined as a roguelike space shooter: start with a ship, kill pseudo-random generated enemies while the background scrolls, get power ups and new awesome weapons, kill more enemies, and if you got hit you die and start over again: just one life here. Roguelikes have always been my favourite genre: gameplay dictates the story and when you die (usually hard and fast) the story is complete.
So, what's the state of the game now? I have been programming the functional engine and all kind of animation and effects.
First of all, there is the ship. It can freely fly around the screen. It has two Attacks:
- Main attack: No ammo, bread and butter. To be shooted constantly. At first just one bullet. Can be improved to get more fire range, fire rate and more bullets at a time.
- Secondary attack: Different kind of weapon/utilities, like mines, shield, beams etc. This weapons are dropped by enemies when they are killed. There are also orbs, also dropped by enemies when dying. There is three colours for orbs, representing different kind of ammo. Every weapon can use one or more colour of orbs as ammo.
I have also designed two kind of Enemy at the moment:
- The "Snake": They are the first enemy you encounter. They do no attack, but they come in packs. They move in a sinusoidal snake-like fashion. Loot is dropped if you manage to kill all the entire "snake". This guy is designed to have the player learning about moving and shooting.
- The "Invader": Aggressive enemy. Harder to kill and they attack with their own bullets. Designed to let the player learn about evading enemy attacks.
There is also a Level System:
- You get exp when you kill a single enemy. - When you get enough exp, you level up. - When you level up, you can choose between two random skills. - Skills are passive bonuses that improve the gameplay: they can be things like more speed, more fire rate/range, more orbs/weapond dropped, better basic weapon, etc
In the reamining time the are some Things To Do:
- Finish designing the level up skills. - Implement the dropped secondary weapons. - Balance the random generated enemies through the level. - Polish the sprites. - Add sound and music. - Double balance all of that!
Today was really the first day of development. My friend Suso and I joined forces and after delivering a while, we decided to go for an action spaceship shooter with an arcade feeling.
The story is centered around humans exploring the universe in a near future. After discovering something that looks like a strange lifeform in a developing stage, they load it on the ship for proper study and prepare to leave, but suddenly they are surrounded by aliens. They have to make their way out!
We really wanted to code like monkeys, so story and gameplay will be further developed in the next days.
We created the project, searched some temporary random sprites on the internet, put our hands into Ashley, learned how it works and after a little while we had a spaceship being rendered. Great!
During the day we developed the movement + input with mouse, shooting system and put a random enemy there to be killed by our awesome ripped-off ship sprite. The enemy is actually the same ship, because we were lazy enough to not change the texture after the copy-pasta. Not really rushing, just wanted to have some fun. We ended the day pluging in my old rusty Xbox 360 controller and having some fun moving the sprite hero with it.
I'm Mario, a 26 year old video-game lover and programmer from Barcelona.
I want to do something fun in the christmas break, so why the heck not do this.
I have used libgdx in the past, and will be using Android Studio, Gimp and BFXR... probably; not really bounded to these. It's a jam! Everything can happen!
My friend Jesus will be joining me (it's a real guy, not the one from The Book).
