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!

30 OCT 2021:

-- Check out the new menu screen! Still working on it, but it's coming along nicely! I added some buttons to inform the player what keys can be pressed here and I hope to add some effects to make them look animated. And literally just about 5 minutes ago I figured out how to highlight the current selection. 

-- I also worked on the planet background logic. "Story" mode will have scripted backgrounds while "Arcade" mode will have more randomized backgrounds. 

-- I forgot to mention this one earlier, but I halved the range for the rapid laser. This encourages the player to use the other two weapons that have full range.

Quote of the week:

"There are decades where nothing happens and then there are weeks where decades happen." -- Vladimir Lenin

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

6 NOV 2021:

- The player ship can explode (again)! This same effect was in the last version, but I initially had issues getting it to work in this new one. Fortunately I was able to figure it out. This is a huge step forward because the player explosion is part of the main game loop.

- You can also see the new Settings screen in action! Because of the framerate it's a little hard to see, but the keys at the bottom light up to correspond with the actual keyboard button you press. 

- Throughout this long process of making Scrapship, I've spent HOURS pacing around and pondering different design decisions. That has paid off as I am very close to a final vision for how I want this game to look and play. Just this week I've made key decisions about Tutorial mode and the difference between Story and Arcade modes.

- I have working shield fighters, but they still need some adjustments so I've been using Blender to  try and make better shield graphics.

- Scrapship now has over 7000 lines of code! What's the most code you've written? I'd love to hear about it in the comments below!

Quote of the week (one of my favorites!):

"A winner is just a loser who tried one more time." -- George Moore Jr.

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

13 NOV 2021:

- Using Asesprite, I finally was able to make some shield effects that I am pretty happy with. Edit-->FX-->Convolution Matrix is a nifty tool for making blur effects. It looks even better once I programmed in some animations.

- I added stars to the background with a little bit of parallax scrolling (objects in the foreground move faster than those in the background). It makes space a little less empty. But I also made sure that the stars were not so large or bright as to be mistaken for enemy projectiles. That is a flaw that I've seen in MANY shmups, even ones by professional game studios.

Ideally, background stars should be very inconspicuous and neutral.

- There is now a screen right after the player ship explodes that informs you what exactly destroyed you. I have plans to integrate a "smart" tip system and stats on either this screen or the next. From here the player can also choose to start the level again or go back to the main menu.

Quote of the Week:
"Your salary is the bribe they give you to forget your dreams."

(Here's another quote that really resonates with me. Have you always dreamed of making your own games? Don't wait for retirement!!! Chasing your dream at 40 (like I did) is so much more satisfying then never starting at all).

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

20 NOV 2021:

- Quite a bit of progress this week! In the GIF above you can see several new features in action:

• The moving stars in the background
• The rocket plumes on they player ship
• The enemy shields flickering as they take damage (a little hard to see because of the GIF quality)
• And most recent, a cool shield explosion effect I made using BlastFX (available on Steam).

- Started working on cards that tell the player a little bit about the different enemies and what strategies to use against them. Below is a sample:

- I also created some explosion animations using some free samples from Embergen. But there is a slight problem, for some reason Blender glitches out after the third frame tries to render. I updated my Nvidia drivers and that didn't work. Thankfully I have a Mac Mini so hopefully I can render the images there and move them back to my Windows machine.

- BlastFX is nice and somewhat simple, but there's no doubt that the effects that can be created by Embergen software are much more impressive visually. I'm currently trying their 14-day free trial (which allows you to do everything but export files). I haven't pulled the trigger on buying the software yet, but if I do, I might be doing some upgrades to all the explosions in the game. 

- Check out the new website for 40wattstudio! I'll be honest, my first attempt at a Squarespace site was pretty awful. So I spent a couple days and now have a website that is simpler and also serves as a landing page for Scrapship. In the future I plan on writing a monthly blog post about something gamedev or software related.

This week is Thanksgiving so I will have very limited gamedev time. I will probably spend most of that with Embergen to make the most of the trial period.

I am very thankful to all my readers and followers on this long-term project! Even a simple upvote or like on a post does a lot to keep me motivated.

Two from Itch.io that I want to give shoutouts to are

Sepi

TheSneak

All of us had projects going about the same time (early 2020) and their feedback has been extremely valuable. Sepi has made some amazing Game Jam games and TheSneak is currently working on a very ambitious Earthbound-like RPG that involves cats . . . and aliens.

Quote of the week:

"Judge the worth of an activity by how you will feel when you are done, not by how it feels at the moment."

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

27 NOV 2021:

Still here! Just now realized it’s Saturday. 

I’ve been on vacation all this week so no updates to the game itself. But I have been listening to a few more episodes of the excellent Game Design Dojo podcast — they have 26 great episodes covering all aspects of game development. 

Side note: Still trying to find a gift for someone this Christmas? I’ve been playing the board game Terraforming Mars most of this week and having an absolute blast!

Quote of the week:

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” — Wayne Gretzky

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

4 DEC 2021:

- I was able to get a discounted Embergen subscription! For those that don't know, Embergen is a software package that exclusively has to do with explosions. Previously I was using BlastFX, which was much cheaper and more intuitive, but also more limited and the final results were usually only average. From the little I've played with it, Embergen has a significantly greater learning curve -- but fortunately it comes pre-packaged with 100 sample projects. So I was able to find one similar to the effect I wanted and -- voila! -- you have the explosion that you see above. I like how it looks more random and asymmetrical. Another cool thing is that you can render out your explosions in Embergen . . . or render them out in Blender if you so desire.

The annual Embergen subscription is a little pricey for a solo inde developer like myself, but I think the ability to make high-quality explosions will be a multiplier in Scrapship and future games.

- That was the major highlight from this week -- I was on yet another business trip that ate up all my time. But I did get to listen to several episodes of the Game Design Dojo podcast. Highly recommended! The episodes on Puzzles and  Physics were very educational. 

Quote of the Week:

"Today I will do what others won't, so that tomorrow I can do what others can't." -- Jerry Rice

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

11 DEC 2021:

This week I learned some important lessons in game development:

#1: Sometimes you need to take a step back before you can move forward. 

I had this idea that the fighters would launch in semi-random waves of about 5 fighters per wave. Initially things were going well, but then I found some bugs with ships not behaving properly. Furthermore, the fighters were now way too powerful and the game wasn't fun anymore. 

So I scrapped the fighters.

At least that version of them.

The fighter code alone was 1500 lines, so it simplified things significantly. But more importantly, it gave me an idea for a more efficient way to handle enemies in the rest of the game. As a test, I tried this idea on a few other enemies and liked the results.

#2: Pay yourself before paying others applies to time as well.

If you've been following this devlog, you know that I've been working on this game for almost 2 years now -- bearing in mind that I nearly started from scratch early this year. Part of the delay is because of my sometimes very busy job in addition to my other obligations. 

You've probably heard the saying "Pay yourself, before paying others." Well this week I found that the same thing applies to time. 

I'll explain.

Up to now, I was mostly working on Scrapship AFTER I got home from work, with the unsurprising result that I wasn't "fully charged" to give the game my 100% effort. Some days I would only put in about 15 minutes a day. :(

So I changed that. I adjusted my sleeping schedule to wake up at 0530 every morning. By 0600, I'm well awake and this gives me a solid and deathly quiet hour to work on Scrapship.

I've been most impressed with the results so far.

Like I said, I deleted the fighters, but in turn I also got the shield fighters pretty much in their final state. And the same concept I used with the shield fighters will be used for all the other enemies as well. Now I just need to apply it across the board.

#3: If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well

Some developers have an attitude of "I'll ship it now and fix it later. " Here I may be a bit old-fashioned. You see, back in the 80s and 90s, the era of the NES and SNES, game developers didn't have the luxury of patches or fixes after a game shipped. The game had to be pretty much flawless on release day. Very minor bugs of course may have been inevitable, but there would almost certainly be no game-crashing bugs.

You only get one shot to make a first impression. And if your first impression is a half-baked game, then it's very unlikely that people will be eager to try a fixed version. 

A good talking point here is the game No Man's Sky. I was really looking forward to this game when it first came out. But then it did and I played it -- and I was very underwhelmed and disappointed. Supposedly No Man's Sky has made astronomical improvements since then, but I honestly haven't had the urge to bother with it again. Again -- you only get one shot to make a first impression.

So as far as a release date for Scrapship, it'll be done when it's in a very polished state. Polished, not perfected. I'm trying very hard not to be a perfectionist here. But the simple matter is that right now Scrapship has a lot of MUST-HAVES that need to get done before it's ready for some sort of demo or beta. 

I have been restricting my vision on this game. Some players have asked for gamepad support. Others have asked for multiplayer. Others have asked if it will be on Steam. Obviously if I do all of these things the development time is going to extend by quite a while. But even without these things, I 'm  confident that Scrapship is going to be a very unique "shmup". It won't be the kind where you micro-dodge bullets and have to memorize level layouts to get a 1CC clear. If things work out as I envision them, the enemies will react frequently to how the player is doing. Is the player struggling? The difficulty will automatically lower. Is the player a pro? The difficulty will ramp up accordingly.

There are two possible outcomes I see with Scrapship: I can release it very hastily and "fix it later", but I fear the reaction will be, "You spent two years working on a game that's this buggy?!" Then of course I would have few downloads and I would feel like my time had been mostly wasted. 

Or . . . 

I can delay release until I am happy with it. I may have lost a few impatient followers along the way, but at least when someone does play it, they'll be able to say, "Wow, this game is really good!"

Quote of the Week:

"You won't always be motivated, so learn to always be disciplined."

Thanks for reading this (much longer!) devlog and have a great rest of your week!

18 DEC 2021:

- Shield Fighters are pretty much done! They attack in 3 different formations and it is possible for more than one formation to attack at once. By "pretty much done" I mean like the only improvements I could possibly make are ridiculously nitpicky in nature. There is a great chance I might not even change anything.

- I also started on the Bombers. They can attack from the left and the right sides -- before they only came from the right. 

- I brought my Mac Mini with me on vacation in the hopes of getting some work on Scrapship, but so far I've hit two snags. 1) My mouse wheel won't scroll in the QB64 IDE and some of the items in the game are misaligned since I'm using a smaller monitor than what I normally use. So hopefully I can work through or around those. 

Quote of the Week:

"One day or day one? You decide."

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

25 DEC 2021

Merry Christmas everyone!

No updates this week but I’ll be back on schedule starting Monday. Using QB64 with the Mac Mini didn’t work out this time. Not being able to scroll with the middle mouse is awful when your code is almost 8000 lines long. I also noticed that sound wouldn’t even work properly. :/

But this has been a nice week off so I feel sufficiently energized and eager to get back to working on Scrapship!

I got a 1TB SSD drive for Christmas, so that will help ensure my files are always backed up. Using Blender and Unreal Engine has really driven home the importance of having LOTS of harddrive space — it fills up fast!

 Quote of the Week:

“Don’t look back. You’re not going that way.”

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

8 JAN 2022

This week was really fun and challenging because I started integrating the shield fighters and bombers into the new AI system. The AI takes into consideration not only where the player currently is, but where they are projected to be! So if you destroy an enemy on the left side of the screen, then the next enemy is quite likely going to launch on the left side of the screen . 

I also made tweaks to how difficulty is raised/lowered. Initially I was going to have the speed adjust in real-time, but after much thought and testing, I decided that this was a bit too arbitrary and didn’t give the player enough warning. So now enemies will only adjust their speed on their next iteration. 

Another important change was this: Before, if you stunned an enemy, that stunned enemy would come back around for another pass. This really didn’t make any sense — why would a crippled ship bother to make another attack run? So now ships only make one attack run — whether they survive or not — and then reinforcement come in after them (based off the AI system). 

In the future I’ll be testing a “Threat Level” system to calculate how “difficult” the game is it any given moment. The way I have it envisioned, it reminds me a little of the “Wanted” system from the Grand Theft Auto games.  

Ultimately this “Threat Level” system will be integrated into the AI to aid in determining which enemy attacks next. Is the player ship wounded? Launch a weaker enemy. Is the p layer untouched? Launch a tougher one.

In other news, I forgot to mention earlier that I finished listening to all 26 episodes of the Game Design Dojo podcast. VERY informative even though the material is a little dated. A new podcast series I started listening to is “Level Design Lobby”.

Quote of the Week:

“Difficulty is what wakes up the genius.” — Nassim Taleb

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

15 JAN 2022

I’ve been on a business trip all this week, so no Scrapship updates until I return. 

It seems kinda silly writing a devlog entry for a week where nothing happened, but a key element to success is consistency, even if the progress made is negligible. 

But for those of you reading that are making your own game or thinking about making your first game, here’s some inspiration for the rest of the week:

Quote of the Week:

“It’ s a slow process, but quitting won’t speed it up.”

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