Hi all,

Well, in playing around with what I might be able to accomplish in Defold, I figured I'd start with a semi-known formula, and make a sort of "Choplifter" or "Airlift Rescue" type of game (for those old enough to know what those are...). A bunch of years ago I started a little music project with a few co-workers called "Her Majesty's Space Ship" (or HMSS for short), which was folky/bluesy/sometimes surfy music about a 10 year space war. Since it already had a fairly fleshed-out lore and characters, I figured it would be a fun place to start thematically for this game.

For the purposes of the Jam I'm hoping to finish ~3 missions, complete with story/dialogue and varying mission objectives in each. Rescue, recon, bombing runs, escort missions, etc, etc.

At the moment I have basic mechanics for the main player ship, with weapon damage (both enemy- and friendly-fire included) for the ship and all actors (currently just infantry). Friendly people (civilian and military) can also be loaded and unloaded into the rear of the ship to be transported to/from safe locations to fulfill various mission objectives.

I'll hopefully update this topic as I make progress.

Please keep in mind that I am neither a programmer, an artist, nor a designer. IF the game starts to come together into something fun and playable, I have a real artist standing by to replace my "developer (used loosely) art (used very loosely)" with some much nicer stuff. Here's a little GIF. This is zoomed in to about 1/4 or so of the full screen area. Little people heavily inspired by original C&C...

-RSL

I like art style.

I've been spending the weekend learning about "steering behaviors" and managed to implement a basic "seek & fade" type behavior to enemy spaceships, where they attempt to track the player while not getting too close, while also using an "avoid" type behavior to stay out of each others' way. The game is starting to turn into something playable at this point!

looking good

Thanks! This will be my first (finished) game ever. Looking forward to getting it out there.

So it's about 50/50 right now whether I'll have anything worth submitting at the deadline. Got LOADS left to do. Wish me luck...

Good luck! Keep up!          

No pressure, but Choplifter was my favorite VIC-20 game.  I still have the cartridge :)

Well......I uploaded something. Haha. It's an incomplete level where you either win (save all 24 civilians) or die. There's no game over screen or restart, unfortunately. It was a "skin-of-my-teeth" thing to even get this much done by the deadline. I'll be continuing to work on this in the future, refining every single thing about it, fleshing out the story and adding many missions. For now the story is literally "save the 24 civilians" :( even though I have a full 3 parts x 3 missions already planned out, and have scripted a pretty neat "talking heads" GUI for updating mission objectives throughout the mission. *sigh*