Synopsis

• Name: Rocket Shipment
• Genre: Retro 2D space lander/platformer
• Platform: PC (Windows / Maybe Linux?)

Description

Rocket Shipment is a 2D platformer/lander game where you maneuver a spaceship through tight caverns to deliver colored packages to the right platforms. Determine the optimal path, keep an eye on your fuel levels and watch out for dangerous alien technologies. Don't collide with caverns walls and try to neatly land on the designated platforms. This game was inspired by Crazy Gravity and titles such as Gravity force/Thrust/Solar Jetman.

Features

• Haul crates from one platform to another
• Keep an eye on your fuel levels and refill if needed
• Complete lots of levels
• Construct your own levels with a level designer
• Avoid (or maybe defeat?) enemies as they try to stop you
• Upgrade your ship for maximum shippage

GIFs of progress:

Parallax background:

Cable shooting:

Level editing:

Status and technical stuff

At the moment I am at a very early stage in development. I am developing this game in C++, using SFML as a base. I am building a custom engine around this game with the purpose of being able to reuse it later for simple 2D games with collision and physics.

Extra info

My game page can be found here. I have already posted lots of devlogs there.

I'm working on this project in my free time, which means updates are sporadic. I'm trying to have at least 1 monthly update for you guys. I will update this blog and all my other channels(gamejolt,  indieDB,  twitter,  reddit) whenever I have something to share.

Feel free to comment on anything you see, or if you simply want to say hi :).

Devlog #042: Under the hood stuff

My work for the last 2 weeks might not be very rivoting. I've done a lot of less visible work for the level designer like:
- Disabling camera movement when a GUI screen is visible
- Disabling other GUI parts when pause screen is active
- Fixing GUI interaction issues during camera movement
- Making GUI in the level designer more clear
- Implementing unicode text input

I've now added a delete button to the load level screen. 
In case you want to delete a level you made before, this is how:

Furthermore I've dabbled with implementing zooming in and out in the level designer, but it proved very tricky and basically needed a lot of complex changes to keep the UI graphics stable.
If I need zooming for enything else I might implement it anyway, but for now the effort does not seem worth the gain, so I'm dropping it.

That's it for this small update.
Next on the list is implementing pop up screens for showing errors or other stuff, and then finally some gameplay programming!

Devlog #043: Flags and errors

I'm so happy to finally start work on gameplay.
I rounded up work on the level designer with creating some error screens when the user enters an invalid level name for example.
Here's how it looks:

I have a lot planned to work on regarding gameplay now.
I started adding flags to the platforms. The flags make the platform colors a lot clearer, plus it's a nice little heads-up that you found a platform when exploring.
At the top of this post you can see a small preview on how it looks currently while designing a level.

It may not look like much, but I've combined this change with a lot of preparing work for the crate/ship detection on platforms. 
Behind the scenes the game now recognizes and manages platforms, which by themselves know exactly which tiles are part of it.

Next on the list after crate detection is a crate delivery counter UI that tells the player how many crates still need to be delivered. 
A crate limit per platform is also on the list. This is a bit harder to implement cause I also want the player to be able to set this limit when designing a level theirselves.

I'm currently thinking about how to clearly let the player know the crate they just dropped is successfully delivered. Perhaps changing the color of the crate or something...

Devlog #044: Crate detection and optimisation

This is an update I've been aching to share: Crate detection has been implemented!
You now see a nice little checkmark when crates are dropped onto platforms with the same color. A counter in the top right will indicate your total progress by showing how many crates have been successfully delivered.

While doing some performance tests I did see some problems when using a lot of tiles and crates.
I've worked on improving the performance and have been able to boost it significantly. Still I'm not sure if the performance is good enough. I guess I will find out when I actually build an official level.
One of the big improvements was using space partitioning for the collision detection. This means the program monitors the locations of the colliders and sorts them in a list of spaces. 
When a collider then wants to check for a collision it only checks the colliders in the same space as itself. This way the program does not need to check all the colliders that are far away.

I also visualized these spaces when viewing the game in debug mode. You can see tem drawn as white boxes.

That's it for now!
I'm planning to start on sounds next. Most challenging will probably be implementing the clashing sounds when a crate hits the ground. The sound volume needs to be adjusted to fit the speed of impact.