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!

22 JAN 2022:

Back at it!

- This week I learned something HUGE! How to print data to a text file in QB64:

The cool thing about this is that now I have a way of making logfiles for debugging purposes! It's already come in handy by informing me that a few of my variables were activating more often than they needed to. 

Whatever programming language you're working with, I highly recommend implementing some sort of system like this at the beginning of your project -- it can save you hours of frustrating troubleshooting.

- I started adding in the new Cruiser logic. Cruisers will be able to attack individually or in pairs. Also, they spawn relative to the player position.

- The AI system in general is coming along nicely. It's very good at "predicting" where the player will be and attacking that sector. 

- Scrapship is now over 9000 lines of code! What's the most code you've ever written for one program?

- I won't reveal them just yet, but I have 2 new ideas: One is for the Cruisers and the other is for the background graphics. These should be very easy to implement and will improve the game greatly I think.

Quote of the Week:

"Believe you can and you're halfway there."

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

29 JAN 2022:

LOTS of progress! I do a minimum of 1 hr/day but most days I was putting in 2-3 hours. So I was able to get about 14 to 21 hours worth of work done this week!

- The AI system is about 90% done! At the game start, it throws random enemies at you based on your desired difficulty. Once you start playing, the game is periodically evaluating your progress (and position) to see what it needs to do next to make the game easier or harder. I should have a video of this system in action next week.

- Very briefly the code got up to about 10,000 lines. But I realized I was doing a lot of unnecessary repetition so I found a way to refactor and condense it down to a little under 9000 again. Most of my time was spent doing this, as reorganizing the code introduced some bugs that I had to chase down and fix.

- Lots of minor bug fixes and deleted code and features that were no longer needed.

In the following weeks, I will have some major announcements about Scrapship -- and other projects!

Quote of the Week:

"If you can't yet do great things, do small things in a great way." -- Napoleon Hill

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

5 FEB 2022:

- When does a level end? What happens if the player only damages an enemy?

I was able to answer both of these answers by introducing a Morale system for the enemy. As you damage and destroy enemy ships, their morale goes down. If it goes down enough, then the level ends. Basically, the entire level is a sort of boss fight where you are always aware of how far you are from the end.

For ease of interpretation, I made analog and digital versions of the current Morale. 

- In this video you can see some of the newer gameplay in action as the player ship weaves in and out of the enemy formations. 

- There is now a second battleship! This one can enter from the right side of the screen. Here is a list of the possible enemies that can be spawned:

A brace of three shield fighters or a long row of one.

A single bomber or two at once.

A single cruiser or two at once.

A single battleship from the left.

A single battleship from the right.

- Still much to be done, but this is perhaps the first time where I feel like the end is really in sight. Pretty much all that remains are boss enemies, level design, fine-tuning adjustments and bug-squashing.

Still here? Good, because I have two major announcements:

- I've been spending a lot of time thinking about what to do with Scrapship when it's done. This is subject to change, but my intent is to make Scrapship a free game. Completely, 100% free. No ads. No "extra-features" or skins you can buy. Just the whole game up-front.  Why am I picking this release model? Sure, I could charge $5 for it and offer a free demo -- but let's be realistic here: Although Scrapship aims to be quite different, shmups are a very over-saturated genre. It's very hard to get people to play shmups to begin with. And in the end, I would much rather have lots of people play Scrapship for free than have only a handful of people play it after purchase. If people like it, then they're welcome to offer a donation. This will especially come in handy because of my second announcement:

- I have a new game idea for when I finish Scrapship! During the pandemic, I started watching sailing videos. There are already lots of sailing games out there, but most of them are focused on pirates, trading or racing. Most of these are very arcade-style with an emphasis on action. My new game will be heading in a different direction. I won't give out too many details, but my goal is for this game to be "a persistent and open world".

This is going to be incredibly ambitious, but I already have a lot of things figured out on paper and some aspects have even been tested in previous programs I've written. The key to getting this to actually work is to remain dedicated to an MVP (minimum viable product) and then scale from there. While a demo may be available in about a year or two, the complete game may take even longer.

Quote of the Week:

"80% of success is showing up." -- Woody Allen

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

12 FEB 2022:

- What you see above is the screen when the player dies: (still a work in progress)

- First off, it tells you how many enemies you destroyed. It only highlights the applicable rows. 

- Below that, it shows your highest Threat Level, which just shows how hard the game was when you died. Think of the wanted system in the Grand Theft Auto games and you get the idea.

- Below that, the game always tells you exactly what killed you: A collision with a ship or a projectile. This has also come in very handy for debugging! 

- Finally, the player can choose to play again or exit to the desktop.

- Having the music stop when the player died was causing the game to crash. So I experimented with having the volume decrease on player death and increase back to the previous user setting when they chose to play again.

- I'm working on different backgrounds. In the gif above I'm experimenting with a green nebula between the two star layers. Ultimately I'd like to have randomly generated nebulae, but so far it's been a little difficult to achieve. Once you start stacking layers they have a tendency to cancel each other out which makes it less visually appealing.

- Carriers are done! You may encounter a carrier that spawns on the left side of the screen, or the right.

- The game currently has 13 different enemy configurations and there is almost always more than one configuration active at any one time.

- Fixed a bug where the cruiser "beaks" would still open even after the cruiser had been stunned.

- Bombers no longer slow down when hit (but the hit does contribute to morale reduction).

I have two business trips that will take up the rest of February, so there may not be much in the way of updates until March, but I will keep posting weekly out of habit and to share my weekly motivational quote. Speaking of which:

Quote of the Week:

"Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm." -- Winston Churchill

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

19 FEB 2022:

- Scrapship has now been in development for 2 years! I started this devlog 16 Feb 2020. Definitely a LOT longer than I anticipated. But I'm determined to finish it, even if the progress seems slow at times.

- Experimenting with logic that will allow enemies to escape if they take too much damage.

- Various bug fixes. In particular, the game would crash by getting stuck in an endless loop. Fortunately it seems to be fixed now.

- There will be no real updates next week as I'll be on a business trip.

Quote of the Week: 

"Vision without execution is hallucination."

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

26 FEB 2020:

Still on my business trip so this weekend I’m going to post a checklist of what needs to get done to finish Scrapship. This is not an exhaustive list, but contains most of the major items I can think of.

THINGS IN THE GAME THAT NEED ADJUSTMENT:

- Enemy AI system

- Explosions and particle effects

- Scaling at different resolutions

- Music

THINGS NOT IN THE GAME YET:

- Cargo ship boss enemy

- Final boss enemy

- Background graphics (nebulae, more planets, etc)

Quote of the Week:

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” — Thomas Edison

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

5 MAR 2022

- A big problem was that even though the cruisers had a "beak opening" animation to warn the player that it was about to fire, I still found myself accidentally flying into the laser path. It's hard to be looking at your player ship AND watching for all the cruisers simultaneously. To give the player more warning, I added in a "pre-fire" animation which is just a bunch of harmless pixels that basically show the cruiser gun spooling up. This looks much better and gives the player that advance warning I was looking for.

- Added engine exhaust animations to the cruiser.

- Cruisers can try to escape if they take too much damage.

- I also spent a lot of time with Embergen this week. I'm getting better at using it. Just this morning I figured out why my renders were coming out all black. It was because I had the opacity turned all the way down.

I haven't heard of too many indie devs using Embergen, but it is VERY powerful software and can do a lot. I've been working on making better explosions since that is such an integral part of any good shmup. What software do you use for your special effects?

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Try many things once to figure out what you want to do twice." -- Traf

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

19 MAR 2022:

- When the player reaches the end of a level they dock with a Railgun that shoots them towards the next sector. Above you can see my very basic Blender attempt at making a Railgun. This may or may not be the final version of how it looks.

- The game can load in about 10 seconds now (down from 16). I did this by cropping down some of my images and loading .bmp images instead of .jpg or .png. 

- The game file size is about 360MB. Most of that is my .bmp animation sequence of 50 images that take up 234MB. Alternately, if I go with .jpg images for the same sequence, the size is reduced to an awesome 6MB . . . but it does add an extra second to the load time.

I'll be on a business trip for the next three weeks, so there won't be any new updates. I do plan on uploading some screenshots of other parts of the game though.

Quote of the Week:

"Effort is a reflection of interest."

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

26 MAR 2022:

Week one of three of my business trip. Here’s a teaser of one of the backgrounds that was made for Scrapship.  This is not the angle that will be used in the game, but gives you an idea of what it might look like. New screenshot next week!

Need a new podcast to listen to? I can heartily recommend The Game Design Round Table. Hours and hours of good content. I’m only 7 episodes in and there are over 200 of them. What’s cool about this one is that it talks about board games in addition to video games and it’s instructive to see how much the two have in common and how they differ.

Currently playing: Genshin Impact

Quote of the Week:

“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” — Sylvia Plath

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

2 APRIL 2022:

Week 2 (of 3) of my business trip. This week I’m sharing a little preview of one of the boss enemies in the game — the Cargo Ship. This asset is already in the game, but still needs all the logic programmed into it.

Quote of the Week: 

“When setting out on a journey do not seek advice from someone who never left home.”  -Rumi

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

9 APRIL 2022:

Finally done with my business trip! As is my habit, I got up at 0530 and worked on Scrapship for an hour. Feels good to be working on it again! Being away from my source code for 3 weeks wasn't really intimidating as the code is pretty self-explanatory (to me at least). I'm sure it also helps that I've been working on it almost daily for the past 2 years. But having time away from your project can also help you see things in a fresh new way.

This morning I started adding in the logic for level transitions: When the player has destroyed enough enemies, the remaining enemies will retreat and the railgun platform will appear.  This will later trigger a level transition animation. One step closer to fleshing out the main game loop!

Above is a teaser of the final boss enemy. It's in the game currently, but still needs all its behavior programmed and animations done.

As I write I got Windows 11 downloading in the background and I've read that it's still compatible with QB64, which is the programming language I'm using to make this game.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day." -- Jim Rohn

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

16 APR 2022:

A great week with lots of new features!

- As shown above, enemies now blow apart into scrap when destroyed!

- This scrap can also be collected by the player. An on-screen counter keeps track of how much has been accumulated. Scrap will later be used to repair your ship or as ammo for a scrap storm.

- The basic level transition framework is in place. You can go from the first to the last level, but the levels themselves still need to be fully fleshed out.

- Started making unique scrap for the enemy ships. 

Quote of the Week:

"If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's." 

(side note: This quote is attributed to either Carl Jung or Joseph Campbell, but nobody references the original source).

Thanks for reading and have a great Easter!

23 APR 2022:

- An early request for the game was a store of some sort or some way to repair your ship between levels. This feature is now in the game as shown above. You can repair individual segments of your ship for 5 Scrap each. For 10 Scrap you can buy the ability to request a Scrapstorm -- the railgun launches a volley of high-speed scrap at all the enemies on screen.

- The Scrapstorm is back in the game. You press "B" to activate it. This is basically Scrapship's equivalent of a "Bomb" in other shmups.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do." -- Steve Jobs

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

30 APR 2022: 

- This was apparently "bug" week, the first bug being the stomach bug I got, so no development was done for a couple days. Side note: If you ever do get a stomach bug, ginger ale and kaopectate soft chews help considerably!

- Gamewise, there' s still a bug in the AI system that sometimes causes the game to crash by causing an endless loop. Trying to figure out the exact cause has been elusive thus far. So I opened a new project file with just the AI code to see if I could make some sense of it.

- I found a way to simplify the shield fighter code. I was almost to 11,000 lines of code and now I'm just under 10,000 again.

- I forgot to mention earlier that Scrapship does work on Windows 11 now.  Windows 10 should still be fine too since the vast majority of it was made using that.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways it won't work." -- Thomas Edison

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