3 APRIL 2021:

-- Thanks to my excellent debug system, I fixed a bug where the game would crash if left idle for a few minutes -- a background function would keep trying to shrink down a graphic that was already reduced to its smallest size.

-- I've designed the code so that only ON-SCREEN objects check for collisions.

Hit detection can be VERY "expensive" in a shmup. Some bullet-hell games (like Dodonpachi Daioujou) are made so that hits are only calculated on every other game loop.  In all previous versions of Scrapship, I was checking for collisions whether the object was on-screen or not.

-- Just started to code this out, but Difficulty is now determined by how often the enemy spawns, not by the number of ships.  The previous "Wave" system I used for Difficulty definitely worked . . . but it was also nightmarishly complicated and some lines of code had to be written in very specific places.

If it works as I intend, the player will be able to change Difficulty mid-game -- something that could not have been done in previous versions.

-- The spawn-code for the Fighter enemy has been added back in. 

Thanks for reading and have a good Easter weekend!

10 APRIL 2021:

-- Added banking animations to the enemy fighters. 

-- Added some simple movement AI.

-- Started programming the hit detection for the different segments.

-- Lesson  learned: If you have an image you really like (with a transparent background), do NOT edit it in Microsoft Paint -- it will remove the transparency and turn it a solid white color.

Thanks for reading and have a good rest of your weekend!

17 APRIL 2021:

-- Scrapship has hit a milestone! Over 100 downloads! Sounds small, but for an unfinished game in an over-saturated genre I think it's really good. Thanks to everyone for their support!

-- Finished the hit detection for the enemy fighters. In the above .gif you can see the AI at work and the new banking animations. What do you think? 

-- I fixed the player bullets after I messed them up in Microsoft Paint. They're a little different looking but pretty close. 

-- I had very briefly added the particle explosions back in, but it was making the code very complicated so I took it back out. I'll work on that more later. 

-- Added Credits option to the  main menu and started adding those screens back in. 

In other news, I'm about 40-50% done with my QBasic Gamejam game. Look for that one towards the end of the month!

Quote of the Week:

"A user interface is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it's not that good." -- Martin LeBlanc

Thanks for reading and have a good rest of your weekend!

1 MAY 2021:

- Fighters can now attack and damage the player! The logic is still WIP which is why both wings are shot off instead of just one. But what is really cool is how the ship appears damaged even when viewed from different banking angles. 

In other news, my game Wallet Warrior has been submitted to the Jam for All Basic Dialects #1. Voting ends in about a week. It was a fun experience and I learned some new techniques that I hope to later implement into Scrapship!

Quote of the Week:

"No risk, no story."

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

7 MAY 2021:

- Better AI for the enemies! Each enemy type will have 3 levels of AI along the lines of Easy, Normal and Hard. At each level they get a little more aggressive. On Easy, the fighters just fly straight down the screen. On Normal, some fighters will now bank towards the player. On Hard, some fighters will rapidly bank across the screen.

- Fighter damage. If you shoot off the left engine of the fighter, you would imagine there would be a reduction in speed, right? That's exactly what happens now!

- Player cockpit can now take damage! Still playing around with this one, but it looks promising. It will take 2-5 direct hits to destroy the player. Two hits only if the enemy manages to hit the cockpit twice. 

- Better Hit Detection. All "hits" from projectiles are based off the location of the middle-most pixel of the sprite. Not only does this make the hit detection more realistic, it is also more forgiving -- a projectile can graze your wing and still miss.

A QUESTION ABOUT DIFFICULTY:

What should make Scrapship "Difficult"? 

The level of the AI?

The amount of damage the player does? 

Both?

Something else?

Right now, not only does the AI get better, but the player damage is decreased the harder it gets. But perhaps this is going a little too far. 

Please let me know in the comments below!

Quote of the Week:

"The only disability in life is a bad attitude." -- Scott Hamilton

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

15 MAY 2021:

- Enemy fighters can now be stunned! Stunned fighters will continue on their last-known trajectory and will not fire back at you.

- Difficulty changes. Difficulty only affects the AI of the enemy ships, not the player damage. In the gif above you can see some of the new flight patterns the enemy ships take.

- Thoughts about scrap: I'd like to make the scrap in this game more meaningful and/or interesting. It is SCRAPship after all. One idea I've toyed around with is adding physics so that the scrap can bounce around when collided with. Another idea is that scrap can be destroyed with energy weapons by the player OR the enemy, but weapons with mass will propel the scrap.

Quote of the Week: 

"Don't show off, show up!"

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

22 MAY 2021:

New this week on Scrapship: 

- Fighter debris. Debris floats off the enemy fighters after a segment has been sufficiently damaged. 

- New mini-explosion animations! In previous versions, I used a particle explosion effect. Looked cool, but very math-intensive in the background. I spent some time the last two days using BlastFX to make some explosion effects (as shown above). It's "good enough" for now, but I might try and improve how it looks at a later date.

- More thoughts about scrap. I tried an experiment where scrap could bounce off of other objects. It looked a little interesting, but I decided against it for a couple reasons:

• It makes the screen look ridiculously busy. The player should be focused more on their ship and the enemy ships and projectiles and that's hard to do when one's eye is constantly being distracted by scrap flying around. 
• Collision-detection with the floating scrap was not very good. Sometimes it would bounce off of objects properly and sometimes it would get stuck. Overall it looked very messy. I could always try and perfect the physics and hit-detection, but my goal this year is to actually finish this game, not get nitpicky over minor features that might not even make it into the final version of the game.

Quote of the Week:

"You cannot improve something that you don't understand."

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

29 MAY 2021:

This week I added the bombers back into the game. They can move and attack but I still need to reprogram the bomb damage and some of the graphics need some improvement. 

We'll see how it goes, but I'm setting a personal goal here: I'd like to have most of the enemy ships back in the game by the end of June. If I can do that, then I'll have a solid 6 months for level design and to polish up the small things: Engine exhaust, more debris, better explosions, etc.

Scrapship has been in development for a little over a year now and I'd like to see it finished before Unreal Engine 5 officially comes out early next year so I can start learning that for other projects. :)

It sounds crazy working on a single game for over a year, but keep in mind that family, work and life often get in the way. Oh, and I'm very lazy, let's not forget that. 

But persistent!

Yesterday there was an awesome short film released by Ian Hubert. It's only about 20 minutes long. But guess how long it took him to make that project? 

THREE. YEARS. 

But the results are very impressive, especially considering that he did most of it himself and used Blender for the models. (Scrapship also uses Blender, btw). 

I say this just to show that it's okay if your personal project runs into a timeframe of years instead of months.

Stick with it!

Quote of the Week:

"If you set your goals ridiculously high and it's a failure, you will fail above everyone else's success." -- James Cameron

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

5 JUNE 2021:

- Fixed the bombs. They can hit the left wing, cockpit, or right wing of your ship. To prevent the bombs from clustering together, I also made it where each one has a random speed setting.

- There is more I could adjust with the bombers, but for now they're "good enough". My plan is to finish the Cruisers this month.

Quote of the Week:

"If you really want to do something, you'll find a way. If you don't, you'll find an excuse."

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

12 JUN 2021:

- Cruisers are back in the game! They can warp in, attack and damage the player.  In return, the player can damage and stun the cruiser -- and crash into it. As with the bombers, I'll be making minor adjustments to everything, but the key thing is it's  currently "good enough" that I can move on to another enemy type.

All of the sprites in this newer version of Scrapship are a little big larger and I've also increased the contrast so the images "pop" more. Here's a picture from an earlier demo to give a comparison:

Quote of the week: 

"People that don't take risks end up working for those who did."

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

19 JUN 2021:

- Shield Fighters are now in the game! Their role will be to protect ships and to limit vertical movement of the player. Right now they can move, be collided with and take damage. As with all the other ships in this game, they'll ultimately have 3 levels of difficulty.

- In the gif above you can see a good example of the player damage. The player ship can take damage to their: Left wing, Left engine, Cockpit, Right wing and Right engine. I originally had it where loss of an engine halved the player speed. Realistic, but also frustrating, so I took that part out.

- I've been thinking a lot about the "MOSCOW" approach to gamedev. You categorize features in your game as "Must-have", "Optional", "Should-have" or "Could-have". I probably butchered the actual acronym but I remember seeing  it on Brackeys or some other gamedev channel on Youtube. The point is, when making your game you need to really focus on the essentials and leave the  "should-have" stuff for later. That's how you prevent scope creep. So with that in mind, I'll primarily be developing with the highest screen resolution in mind. I still plan on doing the other two, but only towards the very end of development when all the "must-haves" are done.

Quote of the week:

"The art of victory is learned in failures." -- Simón Bolívar

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

26 JUN 2021:

- Of all the enemies in Scrapship, the battleship is easily one of the most complicated. Not quite a boss enemy, but not a generic enemy either. Since I'm rebuilding Scrapship I decided I'd take this opportunity to take a more logical approach to the battleship design. The details are intentionally obscured in the above screenshot, but I might even use that as a cool "Stealth mode" . When it comes to graphics, I've learned that some things look "cool" but don't translate well in the context of a video game. The previous version of the battleship had a lot of geometry that looked out of place or looked like it should have served a special purpose, but didn't. Or the guns were different types and sizes which would mean that each gun would have to have different behaviors and projectiles. So this time I simplified things and made the battleship more consistent.
The last battleship also had an extremely complicated 11 segments, each of which could be damaged 2 or 3 times. This really increased the file size of the game and made programming  a lot harder as well. The new version will be much simpler. 

- How close is Scrapship to being finished? The last playable build I uploaded last year had about 70% of my originally envisioned content. Since I rebuilt the project this year, I'd say I'm at about 60% done.

- Don't you get tired of working on the same game for over a year and having to remake it? Yes!!! There are definitely days I just want to quit and start something new, but -- so far -- the secret to my success is this: Do just a little bit every day. Even on weekends. Even if you don't feel like it. Even if it's only a measly 15 minutes a day. Slow momentum is better than no momentum. I'm really hoping to have this game be done by the end of this year, but I also don't want to release it half-baked, either.

Hang in there indie gamedevs!

Quote of the week:

"Pain will leave once it is done teaching you." -- Bruce Lee

Thanks for reading and have a good rest of your weekend!

10 JUL 2021:

Two major improvements to the battleship!!

- It can now fire all 3 guns and hit the player.

- All 3 guns can be damaged. Notice how the right-most gun looks chewed up after being destroyed.

Quote of the week:

"Normal people have great ideas. Legends have great execution." -- Anthony ONeal

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

17 JUL 2021:

- As I was looking at the gif from last week, I noticed something: The rightmost gun base hangs over the edge of the battleship. I quickly realized what caused this: The battleship is a composite of 2 layers, a base layer and the layer with all the guns. In Blender, I had to change some of the gun base geometry to make it flush with the deck and then re-render those layers. That part is fixed so that now the battleship looks like what is shown above (guns hidden for clarity). 

- I also created a damaged version of the battleship:

- For testing purposes, all the guns currently have 1000 HP each. The battleship is killed when all 3 are destroyed. What's really missing is a good explosion animation, so I'll be trying to figure that out in the near future.

- Finally, I revisited the opening animation: I like how it looks, but loading all those images adds about 7 seconds to the load time of the game. So right now I'm trying to figure out if there's a faster way to load graphics in QB64 or if there is some way to manipulate the images to make them smaller in size.

Quote of the week:

"The rarest of all human qualities is consistency." -- Jeremy Bentham

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

24 JUL 2021:

- Started work on the latest enemy: the Carrier! Above you can see a small preview of it. In particular, I simplified its color palette and added some emissive bloom in Blender.

- I also started working on the small fighters that the enemy carrier is going to launch against the player. 

- Finally, I fixed the laser animations for the cruisers. Still some tweaking to be done, but it looks much better now.

Quote of the week:

"Creativity is intelligence having fun." -- Albert Einstein

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

31 JUL 2021:

- Now you can see the new carrier fighter I've been working on! My son actually made the design for it:

It looks a little different in the game because I recreated its pixelated look in Blender and rotated it about 20 degrees. 

Getting these guys to function as intended will be the main focus of  next week.

Quote of the Week:

"If you knew how quickly people forget the dead, you'll stop living to impress people." -- Christopher Walken

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