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!

7 AUG 2021:

- Made a variation on the carrier this week! One type banks left and spawns on the left side of the screen, the other banks right and spawns on the right side of the screen. Both can launch fighters.

- The fighter logic itself has been improved. After launching, they quickly accelerate towards the player, kamikaze style. The player can currently shoot them down and be hit by them. 

- TODO: The carriers themselves need collision boxes and different levels of damage. Also the fighter logic needs  a little adjustment as I suspect they aren't always launching the proper number of fighters. 

- MILESTONE! Scrapship is now past 5000 lines of code. Besides being a nice even number, this is also about where I was last year when I decided to start from scratch. When the carrier is done to my liking I'd say the game is about 75% done.

Quote of the week:

"Someday" is not a day of the week.

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

14 AUG 2021:

- It took some work, but  each carrier now has its own complement of fighters. One of the reasons I restarted Scrapship is because the old version didn't have a good debug system. The new debug system I have now allowed me to figure this out relatively quickly.

- To make it look a little more interesting, I added a green launch light to alert the player to these new fighter threats.

- The carriers also have hitboxes meaning that the player can crash into them if they get too close.

- Carriers also spawn in a way that they don't overlap.

Once I add damage to the carriers they'll be pretty much done and then it's on to the next part of the game!

Quote of the week:

"Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

21 AUG 2021:

- The carrier can now be blown apart piece-by-piece! I found some new Blender techniques for making damage look a little better. Previously I was using a lot of Booleans but now I find it's easier to just randomly delete vertices and see what part of the original mesh remains.

- The above screenshot was from a video that was too long to make a GIF of, but you can view the full-length video here: It will be the most recent post.

Quote of the Week:

"Indecision is the thief of opportunity." -- Cicero

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

28 AUG 2021:

- Ready to move on to the next part of the game! The carriers (left and right) are pretty much done. Collisions against the player? Check. Launching fighters? Check. Carriers can be damaged piece by piece? Check. 

Earlier this week I experimented with making each of the engines receive damage individually. It worked, but the damage animations looked very bad. So I brought the carrier from 5 segments back down to 3 and now it's looking much better (takes up less disk space, too!)

- I have business trips the next two weeks, so development will be a little slow during that time, but if nothing else, that will allow me to refine my concepts for the following areas to make the game complete:

(in no particular order)

- Boss enemy logic

- Level design

- Tutorial mode

- Graphics for debris, explosions, engine exhaust, muzzle flash, etc.

Quote of the week:

"Focus on the destination, not the distance." -- 40wattstudio

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

4 SEP 2021:

Above is what happens when I active all the enemies in the game at once! The game is not meant to be played this way (it's brutally hard!) but it was cool to see just the same.

- I've updated the game progress to 80%! And that's because . . . 

- I've started building out the game modes (Story mode, Arcade mode, and Tutorial). Still lots to do but at least now I have a framework to work with. Last night I was testing music transitions between levels of the game. 

- So when is Scrapship going to be finished? By the end of the year is my non-official goal. But the nice thing about being an indie game developer is that you can set your own release schedule -- nobody is pressuring me to hurry up and finish. I do want to release it within the next few months, but I also don't want to release a half-baked product. So officially I'm going to say this: It's done when I'm happy with it. And this segues in nicely with one of my favorite quotes and the quote for this week:

"Perfection is the enemy of done."

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

11 SEP 2021:

- Continued troubleshooting the music so it can transition properly from level to level.

Quote of the week:

"The successful do what the unsuccessful are unwilling to do."

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

18 SEP 2021:

My day job has certainly been keeping me busy! Had 2 weeks worth of business trips not too long ago and now I'm about to have 2 more weeks of business travel. So Scrapship development has been a little slow recently.
But it still goes on!

In spite of my busy work schedule, I've still made some nice progress:

- I've started work on the first level of the game and had lots of fun play-testing it!
- The music issue I was having before seems to be resolved. Music should now transition fine between levels.
- Just this morning I fixed a bug with the cruisers where the "beaks" were not opening properly. I also made a minor adjustment so that they "warp in" faster.
- I added logic so that only active objects on screen have their logic processed. This should make for a smoother gaming experience.

Above is a little teaser of one of the first bosses you'll encounter in the game. Lots of work to do on that one since I just forked the original Blender file.
Scrapship is just a few lines shy of 6000 lines of code!

Quote of the week:
"Be stronger than your excuses."

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

25 SEP 2021:

On my business trip this week I did a lot of brainstorming about different aspects of Scrapship and came up with some really cool ideas that I'm excited to implement!

- Menu improvements so that the player can see at a glance all the game modes available.

- Fighters that can attack from the bottom of the screen (with ample warning, of course).

- AI for the final boss enemy.

- I like the 3D animation at the beginning of Scrapship, but it does take up a lot of memory. I've thought of a way I could arrange the graphics that should allow for smaller file sizes. This should also minimize the original load time for the game.

- A new Game Tip system

- Then last night I made a really cool discovery! QB64 allows your programs to open websites using the SHELL command! I also learned how to make QR codes if I decide to use those. These two things open up a lot of possibilities!

- This morning I started work on the first boss enemy in Blender. 

I have another business trip next week and maybe another the week after that, but I've been able to use that time to think about some of my design decisions in Scrapship and refine them.  A big problem in games is that developers get in too much of a hurry to create and don't spend enough time thinking about how best to do things. Of course, you can easily spend too much time thinking and brainstorming as well, which is why I usually only brainstorm when I can't actually work on the game.

Quote of the week:

"Not everyone who chased the zebra caught it, but he who caught it, chased it." -- African proverb

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

You can view my latest stories and past projects on Instagram.

2 OCT 2021:

- Started development of the new AI system! Really excited about this one! A problem with many games is that difficulty settings are very subjective. What may be "easy" for you may still be too hard for someone else. This is a problem especially with shmups which are notorious for being difficult. At the same time, you don't want a game that is so easy that it becomes boring. But I believe I have found a way to keep novice players from getting frustrated while still keeping them entertained.

One of my favorite games is F.E.A.R. I've always been in awe of how good the AI was in that game. Made shoot-outs very realistic and satisfying. I'm trying to apply those same basic principles to Scrapship.  I've never been a big fan of the "pre-scripted popcorn enemies that come down from the top of the screen and pose no real threat" gameplay you find in most top-down shooters.

You can see a short video sample of the new AI system here on my Instagram.

- Have you noticed the new profile pic I have here on Itch.io? I used Blender to make a 3D version of my original logo and used emission settings to animate it.

Quote of the week:

"The key to success is to focus on goals, not obstacles."

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

9 OCT 2021:

- Still working on the new AI system. This will take time, but will absolutely make the game better as AI is not something most top-down shooters are known for having.

- Made progress on the first boss enemy animation.

- No business trip this week! And I have Monday off! So I'm definitely looking forward to using this time to catch up on Scrapship!

Quote of the week:

"If you don't sacrifice for what you want, what you want becomes the sacrifice."

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

16 OCT 2021:

- Scrapship is really getting FUN! That's a really good thing to say when you've been playtesting the same game for month after month. It's a good indication that the game is on the right track.

- The new AI system is SWEET! Most top-down shooters launch pre-scripted waves of enemies at you. Scrapship launches enemies based on a variety of factors, such as player performance. When the game is closer to completion I'll give more specifics as to how this all works. But if you think F.E.A.R (the AI aspect of it) meets top-down shooter than you pretty much get the idea.

- Lag has been significantly reduced.

- Enemy ships like the Battleship (pictured above) only fire their guns when their guns are on-screen.

- Improved and fixed some default enemy spawning behavior. 

- Lots of improvement to the code.

Quote of the Week:

"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." -- Peter Drucker

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

23 OCT 2021:

- Started making new background scenes so the player isn't just flying over the moon or earth. Mars, Saturn, etc. Earth turns out really good in Unreal Engine 4, but the other planets . . . not so much. So for the other planets I'm using Blender.

But making new backgrounds also revealed a new problem: Contrast

Here you can see a Mars background, but the default enemy laser color is a bit too similar. So I'll have to think of a way to make the laser colors compatible, not just with a Mars planet background, but with any background that I use in the game.

Good contrast in shmups is absolutely essential. Have you ever played a game where the contrast was so bad that you couldn't tell foreground objects from background objects? I've seen a lot of those. The worst ones are those with star backgrounds where the stars are white dots and the bullets or lasers are also white dots. 

Quote of the week:

"You may delay, but time will not." -- Benjamin Franklin

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