Here we go again.

Another attempt to make a game.

As a solo dev its hard to stay motivated and not abandon 
your project sometimes. I hope this devlog helps to prevent/overcome
periods of lacking motivation.

One the one hand side I consider myself a talented programmer.
My talent for graphics/visuals on the other hand side is less than average (nicely put).

Being completely new to itch.io: here goes hello to everyone - and a happy 2021.

So what is the game going to be?
Maybe some of you have played the boardgame Galaxy Trucker or played games like
FTL, Space Run or Spaz2.

It´s going to be a hybrid of the above with rogue-like elements.
Having worked with unity on one of my laster projects (that never finished)

I´m trying out Godot this time, as my Unity experience was that its often kind of
unresponsive. So far Godot is doing much better on that side.

Current Progress

I started the project on 01.01.2021 (nope - it wasn´t a new years resolution)

Whats working so far:
- Very basic ship editor for testing purposes
- Basic first Mob
- First two ship parts (hull parts the the ship is goig to be built of)
- A first weapon part
- A scrolling background as the setting for the main gameplay loop

Lots of progress yesterday.

I´m starting to get to grips with godot more and more. Had to fight some annoying issues with float keys in Dictionaries and wrongly typed signales, but everything is working smoothly now.

Stuff that got done:

• Structure parts in the Ship-Designer can be removed now
• Added some Custom MouseCursors
• Added some first sounds
• Mobs as well as ship-parts are destructible now
• Added Health Bars for damaged ship-parts

Two more days until I´ll have to get back to my normal Job. I hope I will be able to dedicate enough time to the project to keep it going.

I also fleshed out the concept a bit more.

The game cycle is supposed to look like:

- Run (~60-120 minutes)

     - Composed of 10-15 missions of different types (e.g. transport, event or mining missions)

           - Composed of 3-5 encounters (which can be pirate attackas, meteors, special events, but also elites or bosses)

- Missions are selected on a map (similar to sts/monstertrain)

           - After each Mission the ship may be repaired / new ship parts can be bought/replaced, if the missions target location features a shop/hangar

- There will be three resource types:

          - Money (the intra-runresource, to buy/repair ship parts DURING a run)

          - Experience (awarded after a run, based on how much you got done. Experience increases player level which in return allows for creating larger ships or making certain structures/features stronger)

          - StarDust (basically an inter-run ressource like ambrosia/chtonic keys/darkness in Hades) which can be used to unlock new ship cores (which in return allow for different ship designs/purposes and grant special abilities to the ship like "in field repair", "manually placed shields", "cloaking", "evasion", ...)

The pirates are alive.

• Mob move towards the play ship now and attack the closest part
• Added attack behavior for mobs
• Mobs are spawned in random locations and random numbers
• Also added some animation + sound as an indicator where mobs are going to appear
• First draft of a bottom screen UI Bar - size will stay content still needs to be developed

• Improved behavior to have pirate ships keep some distance from each other
• Added an alternative attack "charged shot" to pirates with an indicator, forcing the player to make a decision which target to attack next
• More random spawn locations for pirates
• Tweaked balancing a bit

Overall the first encounter doesn´t feel too interesting yet. Will need to work some more on balancing and also add some shielding mechanism maybe to force the player to make meaningful decisions.