19 SEP 2020:

The player's ship now has 56 frames of animation! In addition, it also comprises of 4 hit-boxes and can now have chunks shot off in combat. Most shmups do not have this level of destructibility and I can see why: It's very VERY tedious to do! But I think the end result is worth the effort, how about you?

A new scoring system is also being tested.

Look for the next Scrapship demo late September/early October!

26 SEP 2020:

Most of this past week I was on (another) business trip, but I did manage to work on something I've been meaning to do for a while:

Particle explosions! 

In the GIF above you can see the small explosions when you hit enemy ships, but I also have a new one for when the player ship explodes. 

It took a lot of figuring out, but now that I know how to implement it in code, I'll be experimenting with more cool effects along those lines. 

New demo out Monday! Additions/changes from the last version include:

• Player ship can have different segments shot off.
• Player can now change the weapon at any time by pressing "C"
• Full screen mode support (press "F")
• New scoring system

The new demo will be available at the same link as always:

https://40wattstudio.itch.io/scrapship-demo

The laser beams on the enemies look cool.

24 OCT 2020:

This week focused mostly on the green laser that disables enemy ships (much like the Ion Cannon in Star Wars). 

I used BlastFX to make that, plus some other cool explosions that you'll see in the next demo.

Speaking of the next demo, look for it next Friday or Saturday! The game is slowly getting better and I can confidently say that this version is more fun than any of the others!

Keep the feedback coming! Scrapship has a dedicated Discord channel now too!

Have a good weekend everyone!

31 OCT 2020:

A new demo of Scrapship is out and I'm very excited to have you play it!

https://40wattstudio.itch.io/scrapship-demo

But first, let's deal with the elephant in the room.

The planet. 

This is the first demo to feature the new planet background graphics that I made in Unreal Engine 4!

Besides looking a lot cooler, it also gives greater contrast and makes for a better title screen. 

A brief list of improvements from the last demo:

- Fighters can be shot apart piece-by-piece.

- Cruisers have a brand new beam attack and animation.

- Explosion and stun animations.

If you give it a try, please let me know what you think! 

https://40wattstudio.itch.io/scrapship-demo

Have a good rest of your weekend!

7 NOV 2020:

-- Added more player ship debris.
-- Added fighter debris.
-- Cruisers take more damage when their "beak" is open.

I'm also about 1/3 way done with better damaged versions of the cruisers. This part is one of the most tedious but will look very nice when complete because the cruisers will also be able to be shot apart piece-by-piece.

Finally,  a big thanks to everyone that has downloaded and/or given feedback on the game. The consensus seems to be that Scrapship is heading in the right direction!

Have a great rest of your weekend!

https://40wattstudio.itch.io/scrapship-demo

21 NOV 2020:

- Cruisers now have debris that falls off after taking a hit.
- The speed of debris floating away is dependent on which weapon you use. The rapid laser has a smaller mass, so the debris doesn't fly off as quickly. The scrap cannon has more mass, so it causes the debris to fly off much faster.
- You can see some of the new laser graphics I used thanks to a laser asset pack from Wenrexa here on Itch.io. His prices are very Indie friendly if you're looking for game assets.



- I added a "!" to give the player a little more warning when a cruiser was about to fire - or was still firing.


- Finally, I angled the battleship so it looks more 3D. It's also larger which makes it an easier target to hit.

New demo on the horizon! Watch for it towards the end of November!

In other news:
I've been teaching myself Python programming thanks to an excellent brand-new tutorials series by the London App Brewery on Udemy. Right now I'm making a simple Blackjack game as one of the projects.
I've also been following the Beard Games tutorials and learning more about Unreal Engine 4.

Thanksgiving is coming up!
I'm thankful for all the support this project has received! Especially all my followers here on Itch:
https://yahiamoh.itch.io/
https://hammergames.itch.io/
https://wechenbetelly.itch.io/
https://seothen.itch.io/
https://codegnat.itch.io/
https://badeorne.itch.io/
https://pumky.itch.io/
https://valham.itch.io/
https://mobilelast.itch.io/
https://strvstraja.itch.io/
https://yousoldyourmind.itch.io/
https://vladyslu.itch.io/
https://hiddenoceangames.itch.io/
https://grimbag.itch.io/
https://grin-kin.itch.io/
https://itch.io/profile/mkrone
https://johnblood.itch.io/
https://georgelam6.itch.io/
https://peralta.itch.io/
https://kochetovatanya.itch.io/
https://night-clox.itch.io/
https://terrible-entertainment.itch.io/
https://charliecambray.itch.io/
https://sepigamedev.itch.io/
https://svperstring.itch.io/
https://powplowdevs.itch.io/
https://itch.io/profile/mariosello1
https://nuskadamo.itch.io/
https://thesneak.itch.io/

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

28 NOV 2020:

The latest demo of Scrapship is now available for download!

- Better battleship boss (larger and looks more 3D)

- Cruisers can be destroyed piece-by-piece.

- Better weapon graphics

What's next?

With this year coming to a close (thank God!) I've been giving a lot of thought to the future of Scrapship:

- Numbering the demos is getting a little silly at this point. All future demos will just be titled "Scrapship Demo" with distinctions for Alpha, Beta and Final versions.

- Have an idea for Scrapship? The game is still in its Alpha stages so feel free to mention anything you'd like to see!

- Demos will still be released towards the end of each month.

- Watch for the final game sometime in 2021!

https://40wattstudio.itch.io/scrapship-demo

5 DEC 2020:

Shooting at the battleship now shows different levels of damage!

To create this effect, I divided the battleship into 11 different segments, each one having a default state and 3 damage states. It's basically the same principle as the flipbooks you may have played with as a kid.

As a result of this segmentation, the gun that fires can now be destroyed, which should make the battleship fight a little bit easier.

The bomber now has a new pattern and greater contrast. The old one was very hard to see against the black space background.

Segmented damage for the bomber is currently in progress.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Finally, the next Scrapship demo will be released early! Watch for it sometime before December 17th.

In the meantime, the latest build can always be played here.

12 DEC 2020:

The Carrier is now in the game!
-- It spawns at a random moment and location
-- Your ship is instantly destroyed if you collide with this monstrosity!
-- You can damage it and even destroy it, but there are no "Levels of Detail" for damage just yet.
This brings the total enemy count up to 5.
The carrier doesn't have an attack yet, but I do have one in mind.
This carrier model was made by @another_blender_user using Blender. Colors have been modified from the original.

The latest and a final demo of 2020 is on the horizon! Watch for it within the next few days!
This will be the download link (same as always!)

The final Scrapship demo of 2020 has arrived!

https://40wattstudio.itch.io/scrapship-demo

(No, this is not the final Scrapship demo. Still much work to be done in 2021. Hey, that rhymes!)

This time around it is available for both Windows and Mac OS.

What's in store for 2021?

My goal is to completely finish Scrapship. The only thing that might delay this is if my regular job has me travel too much away from my gamedev computers.

Views and downloads have tapered off significantly -- which I'm honestly not surprised about. Top-down space shooters are an over-saturated game genre and hard to generate interest in. Frankly, I consider myself blessed to have had any downloads at all. I also suspect that some might be suffering from what I would call "Demo fatigue". Unless there are major updates, there isn't much point in playing every single demo release.

So with that being said, I'm going to try a slightly different strategy in how I work on Scrapship:

Instead of holding myself to a somewhat arbitrary goal of one demo a month, I'll only update the game when significant progress has been made.

I will still do the weekly Devlogs you are reading here to show that I'm still active.

And of course you can follow me on Instagram for my progress in Scrapship and other game dev projects I have going on in Unreal and Blender.

As this is my last Devlog entry for the year, I'd like to finish off by sharing a screenshot from the very first Demo back in February . . .

. . . and this screenshot from the latest demo in December . . .

Lots of progress has been made and I look forward to sharing the final result with you next year!
Thanks for reading and Happy Holidays!

DESTROY 2020!!!

That's right, I've re-skinned Scrapship to bring you this end-of-year version where you can shoot up 2020 to your heart's content!

I'm only going to leave this version up for ABOUT ONE WEEK, so if you want to play it, please click here and download the SCRAPSHIP2020.ZIP file for Windows.

And just one more thing . . .

Congratulations on surviving 2020!

2 JAN 2020:

I've long had a suspicion that the game lags when too many enemies and objects get on screen.
To prove and put numbers to this, I coded up a simple counter that keeps track of how many times the main game loop runs in 1 second. Optimal is 60 to 62, but I've seen it get down as low as 45 on very busy screens. Obviously this is not ideal.

To fix this, I've reduced some of the quantities of enemies and also optimized some of the code so it's not checking conditions that are irrelevant in the first place.

This will be my main focus for the rest of the week because there's no point creating more enemies and adding to the code if the game has lag issues.
But fortunately this is one of the "easier" things I'll have to fix, more time-consuming than anything.

9 JAN 2021:

This week I found the primary reason for the lag: Nested loops. One block of code alone was checking around 600 calculations. Thankfully I found a way to reduce this significantly by re-ordering the code.

With that issue out of the way, I also started work on a "new" enemy. The shield fighter. There were a few early demos with this enemy, but this new version will be completely redesigned and destructible.  I'm really excited about this one because it will add a new level of strategy to the game!

Click here for the latest demo

23 JAN 2021:

As I mentioned in my last week's post, I had a major decision to make and this week I made that decision:

Starting fresh! 

Surprisingly, I got quite a bit accomplished and I feel that things are moving in a very promising direction.

Here are the most important things I got done:

A NEW ASPECT RATIO

Scrapship will now use the 16:9 Aspect Ratio (instead of 1:1). The game will still take place in a square-shaped arena, but the far left and far right parts of the screen can now hold all my debugging variables, as seen in the partial screenshot above.

THREE SCREEN RESOLUTIONS

Instead of a screen sized 1000x1000, the options are:

1280 x 720

1920 x 1080

2560 x 1440

I think those three will be adequate for most players. Will one of those work on your computer? Please let me know in the comments!

BETTER SCALING

Most of my time was spent here. In previous demos of Scrapship, going fullscreen resulted in a very stretched and pixelated image. I've since learned a LOT about proper scaling techniques in video games. There is still a lot of testing I need to do here. I have code that will allow for automatic scaling, but it's very math-intensive (lots of sin and cos). If it bogs the game down too much, I'll have to look at other ways to achieve the same effect. 

========================================

My strategy this time around is to make sure the menus, screen resolutions, scaling, etc are all working as intended before putting in the actual gameplay. I like to think of this as the "canvas" for the game. You can have a great game, but if the screen the game is played on is not optimized, it's not going to look very good. By analogy, you could be a good painter like Da Vinci or Caravaggio, but if you suddenly have to paint the Mona Lisa on a canvas the size of a postage stamp it's probably not going to look as epic as you imagined.

One of the biggest things I've had to get used to this time around: Referring to screen positions as percentages instead of absolute values. If you place an object at coordinate 100, 800 and then resize the screen, things will look out of place. But if you make that coordinate a percentage relative to the screen size, then things fall into place where they're expected.

Thanks for reading!

Play the old version of Scrapship here.

30 JAN 2021:

Scrapship got its first donation!

This is really exciting for me and definitely motivates me to see the game through to completion!

One of the most important things I learned this week: Scaling works . . . but it also causes the image to "tear" a little and look a bit more jagged than usual. Scaling also sets the x and y coordinates to the center of the sprite instead of the upper left-hand corner. Basically this means that scaling will make hit box calculations much more tedious and complicated to write in code. So with that in mind, I still plan on using scaling, but only in specific instances.

Automatic monitor resolution: I also learned that QB64 has a command that returns the width and height of the current display. Using that, the game now automatically detects your monitor resolution and picks the most applicable window that will fit the screen! I tested this with my BenQ monitor at 2560x1440 and then tried it on my smaller Sceptre monitor at 1920x1080.

A proper pause button: The original  pause button stopped the game -- and that's it. The new one I'm working on shows a "Paused" indication while still showing all the frozen action on screen. Eventually I'll integrate a menu system of some sort so that the player can change things like sound and display settings mid-game.

Hide / unhide debug tools: Allows me to see the game as the player would see it, without all the variables cluttering the side of the screen.

Like any game, Scrapship uses a lot of pictures in various formats and I'm also learning a lot about how to display graphics as "cheaply" as possible.

Imagine you need to make a black box with a thin white border. I did some experiments with Aseprite:

A 1280x1280  .jpg of a black box with a white border -- 33kb.

A 1280x1280 .png of a transparent background with a white border -- 5.8kb

A 1x1280 .jpg of a vertical white line and a 1280x1 of a horizontal white line -- A dirt cheap 452 bytes!

So definitely look at all your options! I was surprised to see that the first .jpg was more "expensive" than the .png.

Thanks for reading!

Play the old version of Scrapship here.

13 FEB 2021:

This week I thought of an even better way to do the opening animation for Scrapship. It also incorporates my idea for a better Settings menu.

The previous versions of Scrapship animated the ship dropping to earth by cycling through about 30 .png files. I recently learned how to accomplish the same effect just by scaling the image! This means I only need one .png file to get the animation started. With these savings in file size, it also means I can make a longer and more dynamic animation without adding too much to the total file size of the game.
I'm not ready to show it off yet, but it's looking promising. Above you can see a small preview of the cockpit of your Scrapship. I added the chair, monitor, joystick and cockpit glass transparency. The rest of the ship was modeled by @another_blender_user on Instagram (who just got first place in a Blender art competition hosted by @polygonia.development).

I also played around with the text-centering feature . . . and ended up having to scrap it. It works if you use QB64's default font, but using a custom font causes the text to never center properly without doing a ridiculous amount of manual adjustments. But I did learn that I can work around this by just making my menus and text in Powerpoint (which is GREAT for centering and aligning text and adding colors and effects) and then using pictures of the text and then centering the pictures.

Side note: Scrapship is programmed in the QB64 version of the QBasic programming language and the first-ever QB64 Game Jam is right here on Itch.io! Of course I was too busy with Scrapship to join in on, but I'll definitely be checking out the game entries. It will be interesting to see what the more experienced programmers at the QB64 forums are able to come up with!

Thanks for reading! May the muses find you working!

20 FEB 2021:

It's coming together nicely!

This week I made the new settings screen which is shown above. What I like about this design is that you can view ALL of the settings on one page (the original version had sub-menus and back buttons that didn't always work properly).

A most welcome surprise was figuring out how to get the text centering feature to work after all! 

The "Intro" of the game is now almost back to its original state. When I run the program it goes like this:

Basic Controls guide (while game assets load in the background)

Settings screen

Opening animation

Start of main game loop

I still have some work to do on the settings screen and the opening animation, but once that's done, the "foundation" for the game will be set and I can start on the fun part: Putting the enemies back in!

Fun fact:

24 February was the release date of the very first Scrapship demo -- it's been almost exactly a year that I've worked on this project! I realize my progress is a bit slower than some indie game developers I follow, but I'm just happy that I'm still going. I usually start projects, get burnt out and then never return to them again. So daily small improvements has absolutely been key to my progress so far. 

As I look back at the condition of Scrapship last year and compare it to today: MAJOR improvements. 

Something special for those that have followed me this far:

A lot of indie game developers here on Itch.io ask: What are "typical view / download" rates for my game?

Of course that varies from game to game, depending on the quality and genre. Shmups or Shooters may be one of the most traditional types of games to make, but they're not as popular as FPS or platformers, etc.

For an unfinished space shooter I think these are some really good numbers. Keep in mind that some of these views and downloads are from the same people since I was releasing new demos every month.

What do you think about these stats? Are they more or less than you expected? Please let me know in the comments below!

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

6 MAR 2021:

The "foundation" of the game is nearly done. Screen resolutions now scale properly. I've also improved the Settings screen so that it only shows valid screen resolutions.

Important Game Dev lessons learned this week:

1) When programming, you can often do things in a very concise manner (less code to read), but the downside is that it might be harder to understand what those lines of code are supposed to do. Sometimes your program makes a lot more sense if you code things out in a longer, more explicit form. This is what I ultimately had to do to solve my issues with screen resolutions and objects not scaling properly. Of course you can always condense/consolidate the code again after you're confident that everything works and you understand how it works.

2) "Boring" work can really make your game a lot better. You've probably noticed that the past few weeks there haven't been any updates on enemies or actual gameplay features. But taking this time to allow for different screen resolutions makes the game look more professional and accommodates players with smaller monitors/laptop screens.

What's next?

The main game loop! As a quick test, I'll see if the player ship can properly collide with another object and "die" before prompting the player to quit or try again. 

Once that works, the "foundation" will be stable enough that I can confidently start re-importing enemies and game logic.

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

13 MAR 2021:

Simplified main game loop is complete! This means you can start the game, crash into a test object and then decide to keep playing or quit. If you decide to keep playing it loops back around to the beginning -- with no loading times!

The riskiest addition this week was copy/pasting the code so the player can shoot. Thankfully it worked! Up to now, most of the new features had to be programmed from scratch.

I also shortened the opening animation by nearly half. Each frame is a 1 to 1.5 MB .png file so they add up pretty quickly.

There is still some work I have to do on the sprites and the other two weapons still need to be added back in.

HAHA! I literally just now figured out how to do something I've been wanting to do for a LOOONG time: Render the Bloom effect while maintaining a transparent background. This is a game-changer! Now I'll be able to add a natural "glow" effect to anything that needs it. 

For those that are interested, here is how I set it up in Compositing (using Blender 2.9x).

Have you used Blender in your indie games? Feel free to share your experience in the comments!

In other news:

I got a small job doing the English Localization for a game on Steam called "Destroy the Demon Army -- Modified". It was an educational experience because I had never worked with .xaml files before and the game itself was fun to play! 

Although gamedev is my primary focus, I am also open to beta-testing and proofreading your game. If you're interested just contact me at 40wattstudio@gmail.com

Have a good rest of your weekend!     (and don't forget about Daylight Savings Time)

20 MAR 2021:

Two of the 3 weapons are now programmed back in. I also added a "hitbox" debug mode (shown above) which will come in really handy.

The debug mode that I added to this version of Scrapship has already proved useful: Earlier this week I was able to use it to troubleshoot some problems with the player bullets and I also discovered that my original code that I had copy/pasted over had an error in it that was causing a random stray shot occasionally.

In Other News:

I signed up for another Game Jam!

The BASIC Game Jam starts in 11 days and can be viewed here.

I'll still be working on Scrapship during this time, but this will give me an opportunity to "recharge" a little and, more importantly, actually finish something. So I"m really looking forward to it!

Thanks for reading! For more frequent updates please check out my Instagram @40wattstudio.
Have a good rest of your weekend (and for some of you, Happy Newroz!)

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!

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!

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!

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!

7 MAY 2022:

- This week saw Scrapship go in a very experimental direction. I don't want to spend too much time describing things that might not work out . . . but if they do, then ooooh boy, Scrapship is going to look and play better than ever! 

- The first of these experiments is a simplification of the AI system. The old AI system mostly worked, but was also buggy in the worst sense possible in that it sometimes caused the game to crash.

- The experimental AI system also requires a change to the screen layout of the game. Instead of a square gamescreen, the game now goes to a windowed fullscreen by default. The benefits here will be that the game will accommodate just about any display. It also gives the game a much more cinematic feel. And if the new system works as planned, the player will have greater control over the difficulty of the game while they're playing.

- A thing I have never liked about shmups is how they too often restrain you to a narrow corridor of action. In this experimental version, almost the entire screen will be used for gameplay!

- I have to emphasize again my excitement at the new direction the game is going in! Hopefully I'll have some screenshots or gifs of this new branch of Scrapship next week.

Quote of the Week:

"Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." -- Thomas Edison

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

14 MAY 2022:

So much progress this week that I can only properly show it off in a Youtube video!

- My experimental branch of Scrapship has been successful and is now the main branch!

- The game now detects the player's desktop width and height and goes to a windowed fullscreen by default. This gives the game a more cinematic effect and creates a lot more playspace.

- The screen moves around the player instead of the player moving around the screen. This massive improvement allows the player to scroll infinitely in any direction while imparting a greater feeling of freedom and space to the experience. To me, it doesn't make sense to confine the player to a narrow corridor of action like you see in a lot of shmups. Especially in a game that takes place in . . . space.

- Reworked AI system that allows a LOT more enemies to spawn. This is still a work in progress, but even as-is, I see it as an improvement over the last version. 

- The THREAT BAR. You'll see this as a red bar on the left side of the screen. Certain actions (like firing your weapons or damaging enemies) will cause it to increase. The game gets harder as the Threat Level increases.

- The MORALE BAR. As you destroy enemies, their morale decreases. When it reaches a set point, the railgun appears allowing you to go to repair your ship and go to the next level.

- More collectible scrap on-screen. Some is "free scrap" that floats around, but destroying enemies also generates scrap that can be collected. Scrap can be spent at the railgun store between levels. The scrap also helps give the player a sense of movement through space.

- Prior to this update, Scrapship was almost at 11,000 lines of code. The current version you see in the video only has 7,500 lines of code. I was able to accomplish this by consolidating a lot of redundant subroutines.

BONUS:

Morale is displayed using a counter that is broken down into hundreds, tens and ones digit spaces. One of my challenges was writing the code to make this decrement properly. Side note: I initially tried a modulus route, but that was returning incorrect values.

Below is the code I used to accomplish this. The same principle can be used in any programming language.

Quote of the Week:

"Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work." -- Aristotle

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

21 MAY 2022:

- In most shmups, the enemies spawn from the top or sides of the screen. While that will also be the case in Scrapship, I'm working on a mechanic where enemies can sometimes spawn from the background. So far it's working as planned. This will ultimately allow more variation in the AI.

- The shield fighters now have a new animation when they spawn.

Quote of the Week:

"You didn't come this far to only come this far."

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

28 MAY 2022:

- Shield fighters can spawn from the background now. There is also an animation of the shield forming.

- Enemies deactivate if the player scrolls too far in certain directions.

- The Threat bar increases when the player is firing their weapon, but cools down when the player is not firing. The idea is that if the player wants a little more challenge, they can become more of a threat by simply firing their weapon. If the player finds the game too hard, they can cease fire so the enemy will view them as less of a threat.

- I put in a fps counter. It starts to lag when it gets down to 40-50 frames per second. This is mostly when larger enemies are on screen, so I'll be working on a way to make the graphics more efficient so the frame rate remains steady.

Quote of the Week:

"Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goals." -- Henry Ford

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

4 JUN 2022:

This week was mostly about balance.

If you think about it, making a game is very similar to someone making a sword. You could have a blade that is extremely sharp, but if it's not balanced properly, the wielder is going to tire out fast. That is why balance is so important in game design as well as in sword-making. We've all played those games that go like this:

Level 1 -- Easy

Level 2 -- A little bit harder

Level 3 -- Suddenly very hard!

That's a sign of a very unbalanced game and I often find myself giving up on games that do that.

At the moment, there are parts of Scrapship that feel very unbalanced. To fix this, I've started rethinking the relationships between different objects in the game.

For example, the Carrier enemy is in the same "class" as the battleship, but has 3x more hit points and takes up twice as much of the screen. It is also over 3 times the file size (500k vs 130k).

To fix these inconsistencies, I've been plotting out in Excel how all the different game assets and objects relate to each other. If the screen size is X by Y, what should be the max size of a planet graphic in the background? If the max planet size is X by Y, what should be the max size of the final boss enemy? And so forth all the way down to the smallest enemy and even projectiles.

When I'm done mapping all this out, the result will be much greater balance and consistency across the board, resulting in a better play experience. It will also affect things like frame rate, because larger enemies take longer to load than smaller ones. A giant planet background may look cool, but can also bring the game to a crawl. And as I'm learning the hard way, it doesn't make much sense to have a 1940x1940 planet background that is only going to be on-screen for about 10 seconds before being scaled down or moved off-screen.

Much of this week was more about number-crunching than actual programming. How slow should a shield fighter move? How fast should a shield fighter move? At either of those speeds, how quickly should the player be able to destroy them? How much more powerful should weapon A be against weapon B? 

A lot of this sounds like it should have been thought about early on -- and you'd be right. But as I'm finding out, the problem with game design is that sometimes you don't know what you need to do until you see that your initial plans aren't working.

I still feel like Scrapship is on the right track and I'm not too worried about Scope Creep. The game is only going to have 5 levels and 5 main enemies. The challenging part is getting it all to mesh together in a way that makes sense and is fun.

Quote of the Week:

"If you want the rainbow, you have to tolerate the rain."

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

this cool devlog! i like this retro screenshots. And idea to make a game. latter- make it good looking. This is a thing to think for myself.

11 JUN 2022:

This week was mostly experiments and tests, but I got a lot out of it.

- To be consistent, I've decided to make all my image sizes a multiple of 8. Ideally, you want to have numbers that are nicely divisible (less math for the computer to do). You could work with an image size like 97x13, but it would be mathematically sloppy.

- Next up, the Battleship. Truth be told, I've never been completely satisfied with how the Battleship enemy has turned out. Below I'll do a quick review of its iterations:

This first one viewed from a top-down angle just looked plain ugly. Even now it's kinda hard to tell what it is.

The next version was bigger and the slightly angled view made it more obvious what it was. Guns not shown because they're a separate layer.

The final version I toyed around with this week will look something like this. Enemies in shmups shouldn't always have to be viewed from a top-down angle and I think this view makes it much more imposing and threatening -- like a Battleship should.

Whereas the previous version only had the 3 guns that could be targeted, the newer version will allow you to attack 4 segments. One for each of the guns, plus the Bridge. I've already tested this version in-game and it looks . . . AWESOME!

Quote of the Week:

"Don't set yourself on fire to keep others warm." -- Gamedev Unlocked             (<---- click here for video link)

It was a little shocking this week to hear that Gamedev Unlocked was going to stop doing Youtube videos. He's that rare indie game developer success story.

But burnout is a very real thing in any creative endeavor. 

As indie developers, we shouldn't be allowing this happen. For me at least, part of the whole allure of being an indie gamedev is being able to call the shots. Feel like working 10 hours in one sitting? Go for it. Only feel like doing 10 minutes? Do that too. Or even take the day off.

I'm blessed to say that I don't feel "burned out" with Scrapship. Sure, it's taking much much longer to finish than I expected, but I'm still having fun with it. I used to really pay attention to follower counts, downloads and other metrics, but I've recently stopped counting those things. If you want your performance to be measured, let me tell you, there are lots of 9-5 jobs that will gladly do that.

We're indie devs, and I hope that means to you what it means to me: We do our own thing and we do it because it's fun!

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

18 JUN 2022:

- This week I created a damaged satellite that you will encounter in Level 1. It's basically the tutorial "enemy" to allow the player to try different weapons and introduce them to the concept of collecting scrap.

- I started scripting out Level 1. A huge part of this is determining when and how the earth and moon appear. Those are definitely images  I do not want to be drawing at full scale when the screen is cluttered with enemies -- creates too much lag. In my tests so far, the game has been running over 60fps, which is what it should be.

- I'm satisfied with the new enemy sizes and tested all of them. Below is a little montage I put together in Powerpoint to give an idea of relative scale:


- Made some adjustments and bug fixes to the threat bar.


QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"You are what you do, not what you say you'll do." -- Carl Jung

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

25 JUN 2022:

BEFORE

AFTER

Before I get knee-deep in coding again, I want to make sure that I'm absolutely happy with how the enemies look. The last one to need improvement was the Carrier. As you can see in the "BEFORE" picture, the original design has a lot of bright, highlighted sections that look cool, but don't make it obvious what their purpose is. Are the bright squares sections you can target? Where do the enemy fighters spawn from?

I started by seeing if I could get away with just making some slight modifications, but it quickly became apparent that would not be possible. I found that there were LOTS of vertices floating in space, disconnected planes and other chaotic geometry. To fix this, I deleted the "hull" section entirely and made heavy use of extrusion and insetting to get the new shape.

Colorwise, I felt it should be incredibly obvious where the enemy spaceships launch from. In the original version, I kinda arbitrarily picked a blue square and tried that out. As you can see now, the only highlighted sections are the hangar (glowing green) and the engines (glowing blue). All other colors have been toned down.

It felt really good to play around with Blender this week and I even learned some new techniques like push/pull. 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"The wise man does at once what the fool does finally." -- Machiavelli

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

2 JULY 2020:

- This week I spent more time refining the AI. It is now set up so that there will be about 19 different attack orientations. I think that provides enough variety.

Shield fighters attack from 1 direction.

Bombers attack from 4 directions (originally only 2)

Cruisers also attack from 4 directions (originally only 1)

Battleships and Carriers each attack from 5 directions  (originally only 2)

- Experimenting with a new shield fighter design, in particular the shield itself. It's not quite where I'd like it to be just yet, but it is getting closer. 

ORIGINAL
EXPERIMENTAL

- I was invited to take part in the 3rd QBasic Game Jam but refused because, let's face it, I really need to finish Scrapship (this year hopefully) and that's not going to happen if I get sidetracked with other projects.

- I have all of next week off so I'm looking forward to getting a lot done!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Don't compare your Chapter One to someone else's Chapter Twenty."

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

9 JULY 2022:

- This week was all about graphics and animation!

- Has it ever happened to you where you play an old version of your game and think, "Hey! That feature was really cool! Why did I get rid of that?" That's basically  what happened with the Shield Fighter. In an earlier version, the shield would move back as it got hit. So I took to Blender and made some adjustments, resulting in the animation you see below.

Next, I turned to Embergen and experimented with some exhaust effects. There was only one problem -- Embergen can't render a transparent background.

A little frustrated by this, I next tried Aseprite because it does have support for rendering transparent backgrounds. But graphics in Aseprite are by their nature very pixelated, which I didn't really want for my game.

Finally, I turned to trusty ol' Blender and found a great (but dated) Youtube tutorial on how to make engine exhaust. But even here, I found that rendering against a transparent background was (seemingly) not possible. Thankfully I found a compositing node tree online that fixed the issue!

The shield fighter was the first to get the new exhaust animation, followed by the player ship.

It would have been nice to have bloom, but trying to render bloom against a transparent background is ridiculously complicated. This article I found here helps explain why. Basically, if your game engine or 3D program doesn't have proper alpha channel support, the best you can hope for is a post-processing type of workaround.

- Finally, I came across some VERY shocking news this week. As you all may know by now, I am developing this game in QB64, a very updated and modern version of the QBasic programming language. The website qb64.org has been EXTREMELY valuable in the forums and official documentation for learning how to use special commands and whatnot. But I recently noticed something: The website was always down whenever I tried to visit it. Thinking it was just server maintenance or something, I thought nothing of it, but then I finally got curious enough to ask on a QB64 discord server where I learned the horrifying truth:

CRAZY HUH? 

So before all this happened, people could upload snippets of code or even whole programs for others to try out. But because of the whole "ownership" issue and backlash, this one guy (who nobody really seems to know very well) just decided to nuke just about everything QB64 related.

So what does this mean for Scrapship? 

Ultimately, nothing. There is a historical backup of the original site that has all the documentation, but it now seems very unlikely that QB64 will be getting any more updates. That's fine, a lot of the new features that have rolled out I haven't been using anyways. All of the core commands and functionalities I need are still there. But it does give me strong reasons to consider switching to a game engine for my next game.

Quote of the Week:

"Don't be the one thing standing in your way."

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

16 JUL 2022:

- The above gif doesn't have all the frames of animation I would like due to the 3MB upload limit, but it gives you a pretty good idea of the state of the Shield Fighter. You can see the shield get damaged by the rapid laser, nullified by the single laser, and the ship stunned by the single laser before being destroyed by the scrap cannon.

- As shown, stunning an enemy deactivates their engines. 

- Not shown, the engines can be targeted individually.

- And then there was a bug that caused the screen to glitch out. After hours of searching and reading through log files, I found it was because an animation was starting at a frame that didn't even exist. But thankfully I got it fixed so I can move on!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: (one I really need to listen to!)

"Strive for progress, not perfection." -- David Perlmutter

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

30 JUL 2022:

Before leaving for my business trip I was able to finish 2 more bombers. You can see the new damage animations on my latest Instagram post. 

It would have been easy to duplicate the damage states for all 4 bombers using Blender's mirror on x/y axis option, but instead I made it so that each bomber has unique damage states. 

As promised last week, here are my two cents on all the recent events surrounding the Unity game engine:

Unity is torn between 2 choices -- do they please the shareholders or do they please the users? At the end of the day, companies exist to make money, and this is especially true of Unity which exists on the stock market as Unity Software Inc. It's not mentioned as much as the Ironsource merger, but I was disappointed to hear that Unity scrapped further development of the Gigaya game demo. In a bit of irony, before I even knew what Gigaya was, I had thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be cool if a game engine had a comprehensive game project that showed off all the possibilities?" Needless to say, it's sad to hear of such a project get scrapped. 

There appear to be some nods to pleasing the users, like their acquisition of Weta Digital, but it also feels like they're trying too hard to compete with Unreal Engine's Metahuman. 

A common refrain I hear on Youtube videos is that Unity needs to fix what they have instead of adding features to it -- much like how Musk teases ideas of new projects when he hasn't even shipped a Cybertruck yet. 

As I'm sure you're all aware by this point, Scrapship is being programmed in QB64 -- no game engine here! But I am considering switching to a game engine for future projects. All this Unity news is certainly food for thought. But ultimately I have to agree with some of the more level-headed Youtubers when it comes to game engines -- game engines are just tools, and the best one is the one you are willing and able to work with. 

And speaking of game engines . . . 

Since I won't have any Scrapship development updates next week, stay tuned for my adventures in making a basic game engine in QB64!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there." -- Will Rogers

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

6 AUG 2022:

One more week of my business trip and looking forward to getting back home and working on Scrapship!

In the meantime, I’ve been leveling up my QB64 skills:

The concept of Game Engines has been on my mind a lot recently, especially with the latest news about Unity and the amazing possibilities displayed by Unreal. 

Creating a game engine like any of those two — or even Godot — is way beyond my ability at the moment, but it got me to thinking . . . What if I made a very simple Text Adventure game engine in QB64?

Basically, it would have 2 main elements — Scenes and Choices. Scenes would be where you have your narrative, “You are in a dark forest at night.” And the Choices would link up to additional scenes. 

Creating this basic framework was pretty easy, but I quickly realized that I was missing a VERY critical element: The ability to save!

So I spent a few mornings learning how to save  data in QB64. 

Right now the program creates a temporary text file. Any inputs from the user are saved to this text file. If the user wants to save their progress, they specify a file name which renames the temporary text file.

Learning how to load data is the next item on my To-Do list.

In the context of Scrapship, this could come in very handy. Although I intend for Scrapship to be a short, one-session type of experience, the ability to save and load data would certainly allow me to do things like save user preferences.

In the context of my Text Adventure game engine, I’ll now have a way to save all the Scenes and Choices that have been created by the player so far.

Quote of the Week:

“Every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

13 AUGUST 2022:

Yesterday I got back from my business trip and turned a year older (42!)

It always feels a little weird coming back to your project after not working on it for so long, but it also feels nice to see it with "fresh eyes" and look at it in a different way. 

I've only had the one morning to work on it so far, so I focused on where I left off -- making the bomber bombs visible before they're launched. You can see above where I did a little experiment of how that might look. The ideas here are as follows:

1) Each bomber can hold up to 2 bombs. I think this gives the bombers sufficient ability to destroy the player without being too little or too much.

2) Because the bombs are visible as soon as the bomber is shown on-screen, the player has a better idea of what sort of threat it presents and how many potential threats (in the form of bombs) remain.

3) I originally made the bombs all black . . . but of course they were then invisible against the blackness of space. So I added a white border so they stand out. It looks a little cartoony this way, so I'll probably adjust the color scheme to make it look better.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Everyone must choose one of two pains: The pain of discipline or the pain of regret."

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

20 AUG 2022:

I ended up scrapping the idea of showing the bombs on the bomber. Yes, it would have been more realistic that way, but it would have also caused the following problems:

1) One of the bombs would have to be "closer" to the player than the other to look correct.

2) The bombs would have to be uniquely positioned on each one of the four types of bombers.

3) The bomber logic would be more complicated.

Instead, I thought of a color-coded system to warn the player of when the bombs would be dropped. Originally I was going to use Red, Yellow and Green. It worked, but I quickly found out that having so many colors was quite the distraction -- as soon as you see the color Yellow and start to realize that it means caution, it has already transitioned to Green meaning a bomb has been dropped. So I got rid of Yellow and now you have the Bomber you see above. Red when it is not dropping a bomb and Green when it is. Even Santa approves of this bomber!

I was hoping to get more done this week and then . . . BUG!

This one was really nasty and actually ended up being TWO BUGS that required video captures, log files and Notepad++ to finally figure it out.

1) The bombs wouldn't even draw to the screen!

2) The bombs would reset much earlier than they should.

The cause of the first bug was that I had an "EXIT FOR" command that ended a FOR-NEXT loop prematurely. So the code that needed to run to initialize some of the bomb variables was completely ignored. 

The cause of the second bug was that I had set the bombs to reset based on the status of the bomber and not the bomb itself.

So a lesson learned here is: Check to make sure your starting conditions are working properly. If not, then everything downstream is going to be affected.

But now that that's fixed, Scrapship now has bombers that attack from the 4 corners of the screen, provide a little bit of warning when they're about to attack, and all the bombers can be blown to pieces. Isn't that what we all want in life?

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"I GET to do this." -- Eva zu Beck

For the context behind this quote, see her Instagram post here.

As always, thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!

27 AUG 2022:

Quite a bit of progress this week!

The cruisers now attack from 3 directions -- from the top, left and right.

The latest post on my Instagram is a video showing how that looks.

Next up -- the Battleship. I've never been completely satisfied with the Battleship design, for a couple of reasons:

- It looks too much like a  battleship and not a spaceship.

- Having 3 guns is cool, but trying to deconflict them as they rotate is a nightmare. 

- The engines on the battleship look disproportionate.

After lots of tests and experiments, I finally came up with a solution!

I chopped off the back end of the battleship and added the engines from the carrier. Not that I'm really going for realism, but it does make sense that if one were creating space battleships and carriers that they would probably use the same engine style for their capital ships. Below you can see a preview of the newly redesigned battleship:

This new design solves all of the problems I listed above. So now comes the tedious part . . . chopping up the battleship into unique segments and programming the logic for the 2 guns so they track the player properly. When this is done, the battleship can come at the player from 4 different directions (45 degrees, 135, 225 and 315).

I also found  a more efficient way to render my graphics. Previously, I was using color depth 16 at 100% compression, but have now found out that color depth 8 at 100% compression looks identical (as far as I can tell). The main upside of this is that graphics rendered at color depth 8 makes the render many times smaller in file size. This will come in handy as I'm aiming for an initial game load time of less than 10 seconds.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"The ticket to victory often comes down to bringing your very best when you feel your worst." -- David Goggins

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

3 SEP 2022:

Because the battleship is much more complicated than other enemies in the game, planning often takes precedence over programming.

This week I tested the left half of the battleship which has the following features:

- The gun has 3 firing positions

- Each position has a firing indicator (green and red for firing and not firing state)

- Each position has a recoil state

- Each position has a stun state

Another challenge was trying to figure out how the player would damage the battleship. In some versions of Scrapship, the player was able to damage 11 unique segments. It looked cool, but wasn't very consistent and was overly complicated.

So although the guns are pretty complicated for the new battleship, the damage will be pretty straightforward: Only the guns on the battleship can be damaged. A shot anywhere else encounters a shield. However, the guns themselves can be destroyed fairly easily and when a gun is destroyed, that half of the ship gets destroyed as well. I do have some fears that this might make the battleship enemies too easy, but battleships will almost never be by themselves -- there will constantly be other enemies trying to destroy you or push you in a different direction. 

Hopefully by the end of next week I'll have a working battleship to show off, but for now I don't want to rush it.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: 

"Great things never came from comfort zones."

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

10 SEP 2022:

- Scrap now rotates when it flies through space. I think this makes the game look much better!

- The scrap generated from destroyed enemies also rotates, relative to the direction it is going in. So scrap going left is going to spin counterclockwise and scrap going right is going to spin clockwise (as seen above).

- I recently discovered a new QB64 forum and saw that they even have a new version of QB64 . . . QB64PE (Phoenix Edition). As a result, Scrapship has now been migrated to this new version.

- In Embergen, I figured out how to get my exported images to look they way they do in the viewport. Embergen is the particle effect / explosion and fire software I use and it is very powerful.

- Finally, I learned A LOT about Sprite Sheets. See this link here for a thread I started here on Itch. This whole time I had been loading graphics in individually, which resulted in a load time of about 10 seconds when the game first starts. Clearly that's not acceptable.

Here's where sprite sheets come in handy: Let's say you have an animation sequence for an explosion that is 100 frames long and each image is 200x200 in size. All of this together, loaded individually, might take up 2.5 MB. However, if you pack all those explosions into a Sprite Sheet, it makes better use of the empty space and you get the same animation at a cost of only 1.5 MB! Now 1 MB doesn't sound like much at first, but when you have lots of graphics files and animation sequences, it can add up very fast. 

I downloaded this amazing program called TexturePacker that makes it easy to drag and drop your individual frames over and it can sort out your sprites in a variety of ways. Furthermore, it works with a variety of game engines and can even export the files that tell you the x and y coordinates of each sprite. Here's a quick sample of some JSON data:

But QB64 is not a game engine. Fortunately, I was able to get some help from the people at the QB64 forums and they clued me in as to how to use code to implement sprite sheets.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Never apologize for having high standards."

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

17 SEP 2022:

It’s funny how this always happens. I have one week of lots of progress followed by another with practically none. 

Before I left for my business trip, I was able to do some tests with sprite sheets  as applied to loading times. So below I’ll recap some of my observations on the different ways of loading graphics into your game.

1) LOADING INDIVIDUAL IMAGES

PROS:  Makes it very easy to change individual graphics files without tampering with the rest of them.

CONS: Doesn’t make good use of physical space, resulting in longer loading times.

2) LOADING A SPRITE SHEET

PROS: Makes better use of physical space. Only loading one .png instead of dozens (or more) individual images. Faster loading times.

CONS: Sprites need to be referenced based on their location on the sprite sheet. This may not be an issue if you’re using a game engine, but it’s more complicated if you’re using code. It also gets more complicated if the sprites have different sizes. 

3) LOADING A SPRITE SHEET . . . AND THEN LOADING THE INDIVIDUAL SPRITES INTO AN ARRAY

PROS: By placing the sprites into an array you can more easily control when an animation starts and where it ends, even allowing for an animation to play backwards. 

CONS: Although convenient, this also increases load times because you’re essentially loading all the graphics twice — once for the entire sprite sheet and then again for each sprite individually. 

For Scrapship, I’ll probably be using option 2, although there may be a few cases (e.g. animated explosions) where I might want to use option 3. 

Finally, I’m not sure exactly how QB64 differs from QB64PE, but I noticed that QB64PE consistently loads Scrapship in about 5 seconds, so that’s a huge improvement in load time without even converting all my individual images to sprite sheets!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” — Steve Jobs

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

24 SEP 2022:

- The first of four battleships is now implemented in the game. The logic needs adjusting and the projectile animations need some work, but so far it's looking the way I'd like. 

- I've mentioned before that .png files are often larger than their .jpg counterparts. But this week I came across a cool website called TinyPNG that does an AWESOME job of compressing png files! How awesome? Check this out!

Both images have the same dimensions and are both .png files. But the original one on the LEFT is 373KB and the one on the RIGHT (which was compressed using TinyPNG) is only 44.2 KB!!! 

373 / 44 = ~8

8 TIMES SMALLER but still looks about the same!

With that being said, I noticed that when you compress some png images, the picture quality GOES DOWN. 

The one on the left is the original and you can see how the shades of green transition much more smoothly than . . . .

. . . the one on the right which is a compressed PNG but has noticeable rings around the shades of green.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"The best view comes after the hardest climb."

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

1 OCT 2022:

- The new battleship is turning out nicely! I'm confident it'll be much better than any of the previous iterations.

- I did have to fix one thing this week though. Originally I was only going to have the battleship turrets move in 3 directions. The problem here was there was an angle of about 90 degrees between each position. So when the player was directly beneath the turret, the gun wasn't even pointed at the player. Major blind spot! So after some testing I decided on a 7-position turret which tracks the player along a 270 degree arc, with 45 degrees of separation between each position.

- I also made a new graphic for the battleship projectile:

This fixes 3 problems:

1. Because it's a round projectile, I don' t have to worry about rotating images to match the angle of the guns. 
2. The round design makes it more obvious if the player takes a hit. 
3. The smaller image size (currently 64x64) is much smaller than the original projectile graphics which were a bulky512x512.

- It's getting closer to the end of the year, so I thought I'd map out a little chart for how I'm going to finish this game:

• Battleships
• Carriers
• AI
• The levels (and any bosses in them)
• Final polish, consistency checking, bug-testing, etc. 
• Release the Game!
 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"The day you plant the seed is not the day you eat the fruit." -- Fabienne Fredrickson

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

8 OCT 2022:

- This week I used Blender to model the guns when they're destroyed.

There's also a model for when the front gun is destroyed. Next on my to-do ilst is a model for when both are destroyed (which destroys the entire battleship).
Want to learn a cool Blender trick?
If you are trying to deform your models, go into EDIT mode, select the FACES icon and then highlight an individual face.
Then right-click and select either SUBDIVIDE or TRIANGULATE FACES. These will give you more edges and vertices to work with, as well as create shapes within the original face.
Then you can select the smaller faces you want to manipulate and use things like rotate and move to give your model a nice contorted and destroyed look.
It's also helpful to subdivide your EDGES too so you have more vertices to play with.
But if you do this, make sure to make a copy of your original model so you can go back in case you mess up.

- In Embergen, I learned how to make a much improved projectile for the battleship:


Much better! I found out how to get the background shape to render so that's how I was able to get the nice "flaming cannonball" look to it.

- The new projectile graphic has been implemented in the game.
- The aft and forward guns now animate independently of each other.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:
"Make friends who force you to level up."

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

15 OCT 2022:

- Growing up, one my favorite arcade games was the shmup RAIDEN. I remember it had some really impressive explosions when you dropped bombs or destroyed enemies. So I really wanted to capture that same feeling with Scrapship. Embergen software  can really create some fantastic explosion effects once you start learning how to build nodes properly and what sliders need adjusting. For the explosion in the gif above, I used a "burst" emitter and then played around with . . . a TON of different settings until I got something that looked cool. It's a lot of trial and error . . . but totally worth it!

Some of the Embergen settings -- that you're probably not going to see in many other explosion effects programs -- pertain to temperature and extinction. You can actually adjust the temperature at which flames turn to smoke. This is critical when you're trying to ensure smoke generates in a short timeframe. It's the smoke that also gives the nice contrast to the rest of the explosion. Flames just by themselves look a bit boring. Below are some of the sliders I'm talking about.

- As you can also see, I "destroyed" the battleship in Blender, so that now you can see it broken apart.

- I also made some minor changes to how the battleship is rendered. Instead of rendering a base layer and overlaying the guns, the battleship now has a top half and a bottom half, which makes it easier to swap out which variations (like if a gun gets destroyed). 

- Battleship 45 (I call it this because it's the one that faces at a 45 degree angle) is pretty much done. Last thing I need to do before moving onto the others is making sure the guns fire at the right angle because they're still off just enough to be noticeable.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Never discourage anyone who continually makes progress, no matter how slow." -- Plato

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

22 OCT 2022:

- The battleship guns now track and fire simultaneously. Looks much better this way! The guns even track the player if you try to fly around the battleship.

- I fixed an issue where the explosions weren't drawing correctly, relative to the battleship.

- Started working on the collision detection with the battleship. (I might come back to this later). The diagonal orientation of the battleship is going to make it tricky to design logical square hit boxes.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Great things are done by a series of small things brought together." -- Vincent van Gogh

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

29 OCT 2022:

- Battleships 45 and 135 are DONE! 

- Started working on Battleship 225 (the third of four battleships).

- As I planned, development of the battleships is much faster now that I already have the first one already finished. I can do a lot of copy and pasting of code and even graphics.

- While the basic battleship design is the same, each of the four are drawn at a different angle and each will have their own unique animations when destroyed in part or in whole.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation." -- Herman Melville

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

12 NOV 2022:

- All 4 Battleships are DONE!  -- Minus some very minor adjustments.

- I also added a subtle flickering effect to the below-deck fires on the Battleships. I'm a strong believer that small attentions to detail can go a long way.

- With all that done, I started on the first of the four Carriers. The "Left Carrier" spawn point is set and can move across the screen. Animating these larger enemies can be a huge chore, so to minimize that -- and to prevent scope creep to some degree -- I've decided that the only target on the Carrier will be the hangar bay as shown above. To make it more interesting and appear as if your bullets are actually detonating inside the Carrier, I used point lights in Blender to give a nice internal explosion effect. It actually turned out much better than I planned! 

- The Carrier Fighters can use some work -- they don't follow the player as well as I would like them to. If the player is too far away they're not even a threat.

- Unlike the Battleships, the Carriers will be a little more unique, especially the ones that face DOWN or UP. 

- A lot of the enemies in Scrapship have very complicated shapes. This makes collisions between enemies and the player very tricky. If the player collides with an enemy, it absolutely has to look like it did -- otherwise the player will cry foul and say that was a very cheap death (and I would agree). This got me to thinking about how other shmups handle collisions with enemies. At the moment I'm considering getting rid of collisions between the player ship and enemy ships entirely. For one, this simplifies things because the game is not having to process  complicated hitbox coordinates. It also gives the player a little more freedom to fly around. Finally, this means that the only objects the player will have to be wary of are projectiles that are obviously projectiles that can hurt you. So if you hit a bomb or a laser, then you probably died fair and square.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"More is lost by indecision than by wrong decision." -- Cicero

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

19 NOV 2022:

- The carrier now has flickering exhaust coming out the back. It's a little hard to see because of the fps limitations of the GIF, but it's there.

- The player can also shut down the engine by shooting the "single laser" at the engine block. It's currently not very evident that this is possible, so I'm looking at ways to change that. 

- When the carrier takes  a certain amount of damage, it accelerates off screen (no point staying around to get blown up!)

- Still working on the carrier fighters. I've tried several variations of movement for them. They need to be aggressive, but not TOO aggressive. The player needs at least a little time to react. 

- I also got a placeholder explosion animation for when the carrier is destroyed. It's literally the same as for the battleship, but closer to the end of development I'll be making more unique explosions in Embergen. In anticipation of this, I went ahead and purchased the full (but discounted) version of TexturePacker which is an incredibly intuitive sprite sheet tool. (Not affiliated with either company, but I do like their products).

- A long time ago I implemented the Threat Level and Morale Level bars. You can see the Threat Level bar in action above. It increases when you are actively engaging enemies because you're more of a threat. Conversely it decreases when you're not firing. Higher Threat Levels will allow for the spawning of more difficult enemies.

- It's been over 2 years since I started Scrapship. Sometimes development has been very tedious and frustrating, but one thing that has always helped keep me going are the VIEW COUNTS by people like you.

Scrapship still averages about 1 view per week . . . even though I don't really do much in the way of marketing and there hasn't been a playable version for quite a while now. The view count for this devlog is nearing 10,000 views, which I find incredible.

So here's a big THANK YOU to everyone who has ever read this devlog or played any of the early demos!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Everyone wants some magic pill -- some life hack -- that eliminates the need to do the work. But that does not exist." -- Jocko Willink

Thanks for reading and (for those in the US) have a HAPPY THANKSGIVING and a great rest of your week!

3 DEC 2022:

- The last of the 4 carriers is done! This is pretty big news because it means from here on out I'll mostly be working on things that I haven't worked on before.

- I simplified and fixed the volume levels for sound effects, music and audio.

- Organized a lot of the variable declarations, making the code much more readable.

- On game exit, it  now properly frees up a lot of the image assets to prevent memory leaks.

ROADMAP:

There are basically 3 main areas I need to complete before I can call Scrapship done.

1) GAME LEVELS

Although the game currently has its 5 levels, most of them are very empty at the moment. So I'll be working on fleshing those out. There are only 5 levels because I only have 5 tracks of music.  But to offset this, I have my AI system which will ensure "random" encounters each and every playthrough. In addition to this, I'm planning on implementing a system where the levels themselves have a bit of randomness to them. Space can be a very empty and boring place, so I'd like to make sure that there is enough "stuff" on-screen to keep things interesting.

2) SCALING 

Right now the game only works at one resolution. I had different resolutions working before, but that was before I branched off to the new version. It's one of those things that shouldn't be too hard to implement, just tedious.

3) BUG FIXES / TESTING

At the beginning of the game's source code I've started a BUGLIST to keep track of what needs fixing. Currently I'm troubleshooting an issue where the level music doesn't restart after the player dies.

IF I HAVE TIME . . .

Not gonna lie . . . working on a game like this for almost 3 years is exhausting. About this time next year I really hope to be working on another game project. So I'll be working hard to make that happen. If time permits, I might add gamepad support. I might also add custom colors to the player ship. But that's about it, anything else would be major scope creep.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny." -- CS Lewis

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

10 DEC 2022:

- Added a background to give the Railgun Store menu more contrast.

- Created a Random Number Generator

- Threat and Morale bars only show on-screen when needed (fighting enemies)

- Music and sound now work properly when transitioning from one level to another.

- Stars speed up and slow down properly when transitioning from one level to another.

- Removed a lot of redundant/unnecessary code.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Dreams are watered by hard work."

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

17 DEC 2022:

- Added a Scrap Collected counter that displays for a little while and then goes away when not needed.

- Created more background scrap.

- Finally learned how to make a decent asteroid in Blender! (shown above)

- Started reading "Procedural Generation in Game Design" by Tanya Short and Tarn Adams (one of the creators of Dwarf Fortress).  I'm only about 20 pages in, but already this book has been well worth it, as it make some very good points about when and how to use procedural generation in games.

- I checked out ChatGPT this week and was pretty impressed with its results. What is ChatGPT? Imagine a Google that answers your question by creating its own response instead of pointing you to a bunch of websites. Here's an example of what ChatGPT can do:

But what's even more cool is that you can literally copy and paste code into ChatGPT and sometimes it will point out your mistakes and explain them. I even asked ChatGPT to write me an outline for a Pong clone in QB64 (a modern version of QBasic) and it did just that. 

ChatGPT does have limitations. It won't entirely write your code for you. Also some of its responses can be very generic (or even wrong). And it pretty frequently rejects input because so many people are trying to use it. 

Nevertheless, I think it's a good tool to have in your game developer toolbox. If you don't have time for StackOverflow or a specialized forum to answer your question, there's a chance that ChatGPT might be able to answer your question right away and point you in the right direction.

But . . . I can also see ChatGPT becoming a crutch for a lot of people instead of doing their own research and work. Ideally, people should have at least a basic understanding of how to do things (math, programming, etc) without having to rely on software to execute or explain it.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"In the information society, nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought." -- Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park

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

24 DEC 2022:

- Started making the Level 1 satellite destructible! 

- Scrap can now rotate counterclockwise. 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

“Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.” — Henry David Thoreau

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

31 DEC 2022:

- Satellite now breaks apart into collectible scrap. This is good progress towards getting Level 1 finished!

- Shield fighters, bombers and cruisers also break apart into collectible scrap.

- Despite some business trips that have kept me away from my Desktop, this has been a productive year for Scrapship! I was looking at this year's devlogs and the game is showing improvement in just about every area, but primarily the enemies (some of which had to be redesigned once or twice).

QUOTE TO START YOUR NEW YEAR:

"The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing." -- Walt Disney

Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your year! Make 2023 great!

7 JAN 2023:

- One of the levels for Scrapship will have a black hole as the background. First I tried Blender — placing random white stars and then rotating the image at high speed. It looked okay, but not chaotic enough. Next I tried Embergen which you see above. They had a hurricane template that I adjusted to look a bit more like a black hole. I don’t think it’s there yet, but it looks decent. What do you think? 

- For the very first level, I started to create a routine that would allow the backgrounds to be procedurally generated. This way the earth and moon won’t always appear in the same place every playthrough. 

- I fixed a bug where the scrap image from the satellite was not keeping its form (you can see this bug in last week’s gif). 

- I’m on a business trip the next 2 weeks, so I won’t have much in the way of updates, but I’ll still update this devlog as I always do and leave you with a . . .

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

“The only way around is through.” — Robert Frost

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

14 JAN 2023:

Still on my business trip so no real Scrapship updates but I have been reading a couple books about procedural generation.

At a very high level, procedural generation works like Mad Libs.  The human user comes up with the parts of speech to make the story (hopefully) hilarious. But coming up with the parts of speech could just as easily be generated by a computer program that generates random parts of speech. 

Though most talk of procedural generation revolves around RPGs and roguelikes, I’ve been thinking about how procedural generation would apply to a shmup like Scrapship. 

Your average shmup has pre-scripted waves of enemies. This is good if you want a predictable experience for people who like to chase high scores, but not very good if you are looking for replay value. 

It’d be very easy to make Scrapship just throw random enemies at you from random spawn points, but that could all too easily turn chaotic. There could be too few enemies . . . or too many. Or maybe they all spawn from the same region and start overlapping each other. There’s a lot that can go wrong with procedural generation. So this is why the concept of “guardrails” is important. Procedural generation works best when a HUMAN sets limits on what is and isn’t allowable. Without these “guardrails” it is all too easy to run into the “10,000 bowls of oatmeal” problem — lots of variation, but not much meaningful variation — one bowl of oatmeal is not much different from  the thousands of other bowls of oatmeal.

The ideal enemy generator for Scrapship needs to fulfill these requirements:

Spawns enemies appropriate to the player’s current performance. 

Spawns enemies in such a way that there is little to no overlap.  

Spawns enemies in quantities that won’t cause the game to lag. 

Occasionally does something completely random to keep things interesting. 

I already have a system in place that addresses most of these things, but another problem with procedural generation is that it is impractical from a human standpoint to vet every single possible combination. Some developers handle this by making an AI that plays the game and records data from each playthrough. This is a great way to see if some levels are too easy or too hard, especially if you don’t have a lot of human play testers. 

Before going on my business trip, the biggest problem I was encountering was enemies vs. lag. As cool as it would be to spawn 3 battleships against the player, battleships are large images and take longer to draw to the screen than smaller enemies. And that’s before factoring in large background images.

Below are some possible ways to handle this problem:

- Limit the number of large objects that can be on screen at any given time.

- Spawn enemies relative to the current framerate or expected framerate. 

- Scale down enemies and/or background objects so they draw to the screen faster.

- See if there are any ways to make the graphic files smaller (jpg vs png, cropping the image, deleting metadata, etc). 

What are your experiences and thoughts about procedural generation? Does your game use it or have you played a game that made good use of it? Let me know in the comments below!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

“Always deliver more than expected.” — Larry Page

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

28 JAN 2023:

This week was all about the Cargo Ship boss enemy! 

Originally it was orientated horizontally but I quickly realized a couple problems with this:

• It would be strange to have the cargo ship moving left/right when the  player is mostly moving up/down.
• Too much lighting made the 3 guns harder to see. 
• Having the guns rotate to follow the player would be a headache to program. 

So instead, I tried a vertical orientation, muted the colors of the cargo ship and changed the colors  and positions of the guns. 

I'm still working on it, but I think this looks much better and will make for a more interesting boss fight.  These 4 guns will be stationary, but the cargo ship will be able to move around left and right while still moving forward. Right now all the guns fire the same type of projectile, but I'll probably change that a little. 

IN OTHER NEWS: 

Hopefully I'm wrong in this, but I'll probably have to look for a new job in about 2 years. As a result, one of my goals is to finish Scrapship before that happens. I'll be trying really hard to finish it this year, but even if it doesn't it's almost guaranteed to be done the year after that. 

So time is very precious right now. I've noticed that I'm the sort of person that easily gets sidetracked -- ESPECIALLY when it comes to Youtube. But just this week I came up with a couple of productivity hacks that I think will help me to focus more:

• I now use 2 web-browsers and not just one. Firefox is for "lazy me", so lots of entertainment-related bookmarks and accounts. But now I also have the Vivaldi browser, and this one is exclusively for "busy me". This one has all my gamedev bookmarks and accounts. The idea is that I will only have one browser open at a time. So when Vivaldi is open, I'm not seeing any "entertainment" content that might get me sidetracked. So far it's worked really well!

• To further encourage myself to be more productive, I made it easier to start up all the content that I use for "busy me". I did this by creating a batch file that automatically opens the Vivaldi browser to my 40wattstudio email, itch.io dashboard and 40wattstudio YT account with all my gamedev-related subscriptions. It even automatically opens up QB64, which I am using to make Scrapship. Less time clicking and typing = more time programming!

On the side, I've been slowly teaching myself how to program in C++, mostly using the YT tutorials by Codebeauty. Having tried python and java, I finally decided to learn C++ due to its long history and use in programs like QB64 and Unreal Engine.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Be undeniably good. No marketing effort or social media buzzword can be a substitute for that." -- Anthony Volodkin

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

4 FEB 2023:

- Scripted the movement for the cargo boss enemy.  Possible directions of movement are up/down/left/right and diagonal in four different directions. 

- Fixed a bug where the player position would shift right after being hit by the battleship.

- Fixed some scrap spawning/scrolling issues.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

“I don’t believe in luck. I believe in preparation.” — Bobby Knight

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

11 FEB 2023:

- Scrapship is over 11,000 lines of code. There's a lot of it that can be consolidated, such as the battleship projectile hit detection which I fixed this morning. 

- The cargo ship can damage the player now, but there is a bug where it doesn't always register a hit. 

- Once I get that bug fixed, both the battleship and the cargo ship boss will be able to use some of the same code.

- The past few months there has been an elusive bug where the game crashes after warping to the next sector. I have it narrowed down to the "Scaling Earth" subroutine. Pretty sure it's because a number is going negative when it needs to only be positive for the math to work.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: 

"A year from now you may wish you had started today." -- Karen Lamb

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

18 FEB 2023:

Scrapship has been in development for 3 years now! I started on 16 February 2020 and have been working on it daily ever since (excepting business trips, vacation and illness). How have I managed to stay motivated to work on this project for so long? I just do a little bit -- 1 hour -- every day. Some days or even weeks I feel like I'm making no progress, but others I feel like huge breakthroughs are being made. Ultimately, I have faith that the end result will be worth the effort. And I've certainly learned A LOT about game development along the way.  The game is certainly getting closer to done, slowly but surely. I'd like to finish this year . . . but I'm also not going to rush it. 

- Made an animation where the cargo ship guns power up to indicate that they're active. 

-  As seen in the gif a couple posts above, the cargo ship's guns were all red. Now, guns that are active are green and only inactive guns are red.  This also helps with the color contrast -- a red projectile coming from a green gun looks much better than a red projectile coming from a red gun. 

- Cargo ship can damage player

- Fixed the bug where scaling the size of the earth was causing the game to crash (a variable was resetting to true when it needed to stay false). 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"You don't concentrate on risks. You concentrate on results." -- Chuck Yeager

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

25 FEB 2023:

Got a LOT done this week! Yesterday I worked off and on most of the day. 

- As I write, I'm in the process of re-rendering the opening animation. This time it will take up the whole screen and not just a square portion of it. This will be much more immersive. Only downside is that the .png files are pretty large, but maybe I can trim them down some to make it more practical. 

- Speaking of trimming down .png files, I cropped all of the images for the battleships and carriers. These were greatly impacting load times. A single battleship graphics folder would be 15MB -- but after cropping the files I got it down to 3MB. Load times also decreased which is excellent. 

- The player can now destroy the cargo ship guns. But I still have to make the destroyed versions in Blender and some explosion effects in Embergen. 

- Also re-organized and simplified some of the code, especially for the player bullets. 

- How convenient, Blender just got done rendering, so here's a gif of the new opening animation! The game is meant to be played in a widescreen format.

- I have a business trip all next week, so probably not much in the way of updates next Saturday.

REMINDER: It's almost the end of the month! You've been working hard! Make those 1s and 0s happy! Back up your harddrive!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life." -- Muhammad Ali

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

4 MAR 2023:

No updates as I was on a business trip this week. And my back hurts (again). I'll elaborate more next week.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Stay hard! -- David Goggins

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

11 MAR 2023:

It feels good to sit again!

I promised last week to elaborate, so here goes:

If I were in an RPG and there were stats for "Back Strength" or "Back Health", I'd probably have stats like 40 (out of a possible 100). My posture sucks most of the time and it doesn't take very much for me to pull a muscle or something that messes it up for a couple of days. 

Now I don't use the standing feature very often, but I am grateful that I had the foresight to buy a standing desk (pictured below).

Problem was, even standing still was sometimes painful. So this time I went to a chiropractor because I really couldn't figure out what I did to hurt my back. Apparently my lower spine was torqued a bit to the left. 

After a couple visits and days off I started to feel better, thank God. So because of that, I was able to get back to work on Scrapship!

Updates for this week . . .

- Scrap can move from right to left.

- Cargo Boss guns can be destroyed

- Cargo Boss can be destroyed

You'll notice that there are still some things missing: The guns need explosion animations and the explosions in general need to be reworked so they're not all the same. I saw that Embergen (the software I use for explosions) will be moving to version 1.0 pretty soon, so hopefully I can take advantage of that to make more cool effects for blowing things up. 

In Other News . . .

There won't be any updates for Scrapship until 7 April. Yep, another business trip. This time I'm going to South Korea, so that should be interesting! I might still do the weekend update, but also maybe not . . . it depends on my internet situation over there. So if you don't see my devlog get updated the next few Saturdays, don't panic! I'm just busy with work is all. 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Small is not just a stepping-stone. Small is a great destination itself." -- Jason Fried

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

18 MAR 2023:

Almost forgot it’s Saturday! 

I was able to work on Scrapship a little in the days before I left for South Korea:

- Level transitions now work all the way from level 1 to level 5. Even the music transitions correctly. This is a pretty significant step towards getting the game done. 

- Scripted one of the background images for the final boss fight.

In other news . . . So yeah, I’m in South Korea now for a business trip. 18 hours worth of flights just to get here. But totally worth it (I think travel is one of the best ways to spend money). 

My hotel room has a flat screen TV almost the size of the mattress and a DESKTOP computer in the room. Of course the IT tech in me is saying , yeah probably not a good idea to use the Desktop computer, who knows what it has installed on it (keyloggers, etc). Besides, I bring my own computers.

Speaking of computers, this brings me to an interesting thought: How much do you think about the hardware that your potentials players use? Unreal Engine 5 looks bloody amazing, but one thing that does scare me away from it is the fact that it requires such a beast of a computer just to develop or play games on. If you’re targeting players in countries that don’t have the income to buy the latest graphics cards then you might be better off developing in Unity or Godot. Surprisingly, I read that electronics (especially phones) are more expense in South Korea than in the US. 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

“Set your goals high, and don’t stop till you get there.” — Bo Jackson

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

25 MAR 2023:

Weekend 2 of 3 of my Korea trip, so no Scrapship updates this week.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Live out of your imagination, not your history." -- Stephen Covey

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

1 APRIL 2023:

Weekend 3 of 3 of my Korea trip, so no Scrapship updates this week.

South Korea has been a blast! Last week my coworker and I found a PC cafe and played some Starcraft (when in Rome . . . ) and some Overwatch 2. A lot of the games on the PC's required a Battlenet account to play.

Looking at other players in the cafe, I saw that they played a variety of games, not just RTS or FPS. Some were playing a soccer game of some sort.  

On the metro, just about everyone is staring at their phones. One guy was watching a playthrough of some FPS and I saw a girl playing a Candy Crush-style puzzle game. I think it's fair to say that mobile gaming is still alive and well. 

On TV, I found an eSport event going on (RTS), but I also found a channel where two players were playing Go (basically Asian chess with black and white stones). This just goes to show that people like the classics just as much as the newer stuff. 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Failure is success in progress." -- Albert Einstein

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

8 APR 2023:

Finally back from my S. Korea trip -- and the jet lag sucks! It was 27 hours from the time I left my hotel to the time I walked in the front door of my house.

In spite of that, I was happy to sit back down to Scrapship and get going on it again. This week was mostly bug fixes and minor adjustments, but there were a lot of them:

- Fixed bug where earth would vanish when it was still on-screen

- Fixed bug where music restarted every time volume adjusted

- Music files stop and close when game ends

- Commented out scaling code for ships and explosions

- Fixed game tips

- Fixed opening animation graphics

- Adjusted player launch sequence (between levels)

As fate would have it, I have another business trip starting next week -- Ft Drum, New York ( at least it's not the middle of winter). I just can't seem to get a break, can I? Fortunately it's only for a week and a half and then HOPEFULLY my schedule should be free for a little while. 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

How you do anything is how you do everything.

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

15 APR 2023:

- I use Embergen software to do all the explosion effects in Scrapship. They just launched version 1.0  a couple weeks ago, so I upgraded my version of it and started familiarizing myself with the new features. One of the biggest things missing in Scrapship right now are different explosions. I have a couple to work with, but obviously it'd be nice to have more variety. And now that I know how to use sprite sheets, I'm hoping I can have that variety with relatively little cost in game performance.

- So far I have 2 more scheduled business trips this year (4 weeks), so that's obviously going to cut into my development time but I'm hoping I can still get the game done or close to done by the end of the year. 

- I have a question for all of you: Do you prefer being able to play a game as it's being developed or do you prefer waiting until a game is completely finished?

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"If you don't have a strategy, you're part of someone else's strategy." -- Alvin Toffler

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

22 APR 2023:

Whew, glad that uploaded! It was 2.986 MB and the limit is 3MB!

- As you can see, I've been working with Embergen 1.0 this week.  Sorely missing from the game at the moment are explosions for minor hits on enemies. The above explosion comes pretty close to what I'm looking for although the in-game version will be much smaller. The actually rendering and exporting was pretty easy, but -- as before -- the hard part  was figuring out how to get the exported frames to look exactly like the viewport frames. 

In my RENDER--> Export settings I had to change my Alpha Blending Mode to Straight Alpha to get the right look. 

- I've found that 20 frames of animation is sufficient for these small explosions. Five frames show the explosion going from nothing to full blast. The next 10 are to ensure those pretty explosions stay on screen long enough for the player to see them. The explosion fades away in the last 5 frames. 

- Right now this folder of 20 frames is about 577kb, but I'll be able to get that even smaller by using a sprite sheet, which I successfully tested and integrated several months ago. 

- Ideally, each ship will have a different "minor hit" animation and possibly a different animation depending on what weapon you use.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"An investment in knowledge pays the best interest." -- Benjamin Franklin

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

29 APR 2023:

- There are now two different explosions when you hit an enemy. A smaller one when you use the "rapid laser" and a larger one when you use the "scrap cannon".

- More importantly, I reworked all of the explosion animation code so that I can show multiple "damage explosions" at once. This took a while to figure out. But it had to be done because there's no point spending time in Embergen making fancy explosions that are only going to be shown once per enemy. 

- One of the nice things about Embergen is that it has a nice amount of PRESETS: 

So I can take a prefabricated effect that is close to what I want and adjust it to my purposes.  Right now I'm trying to make a lightning or electric discharge sort of effect (which they don't have  a preset for, but a few come close in principle). I also saw that they have Premium Presets, the first one being clouds. So if you don't want to buy the Embergen software, you can just buy some presets. Think of it as Kitbash but for explosions, clouds and particle effects. Pretty cool. I'm not affiliated with Embergen by the way, I'm just happy that I found an "explosion solution" that fits my minimal  budget.

- The majority of my development time is going to be in Embergen the next few weeks, with minor code adjustments to get the explosions to line up properly over the enemies. 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"A problem is a chance for you to do your best." -- Duke Ellington

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

6 MAY 2023:

- It took all week and lots of experimentation, but I finally made a lightning effect for the "stun gun"! 

- Below you can see my Embergen node tree for it:

- I always seem to encounter this problem -- rendering bloom. The bloom effect with the lightning looks amazing, but trying to capture it in the final render is elusive if not impossible. So I took the animations to Aseprite:

Here are the Aseprite notes I took on how add some Alpha  while still retaining the bloom effect of the original image:

Open your first image in Aseprite and select "Agree" for "load the following files as an animation."

Click the Layer "Continuous" button in the timeline (links all frames together for changes) (rightmost arrow in above pic)

Click the lock button to upper left of colors to unlock color editing. (leftmost arrow in above pic)

Click down arrow and sort by brightness (or whatever)

Select Sprite --> Color Mode --> Indexed

Use eyedropper tool and click on a color

Change Alpha value (below the color rainbow, not the two color bars below it (middle arrow in above pic)

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: 

"Hide not your talents, they for Use were made. What's a Sun-Dial in the shade?" -- Benjamin Franklin

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

13 MAY 2023:

Hours of gamedev this week = ~9

- Final Boss can spawn in 3 different orientations (experimental)

- Enemies only become stunned after the final frame of the lightning animation

- Simplified main menu

- Enemies don't spawn when bosses are active

- Railgun won't scroll off screen and get lost

- Enemies won't hurt player when railgun is active

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased." -- Katharine Hepburn

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

20 MAY 2023:

- Redesigned Final Boss model 

- Left and right guns for the final boss can be damaged separately

Above is the original model. But I quickly saw a couple problems with it. 

1) Too many unnecessary parts extruding out from it. This also meant that I had to zoom out to fit it all in the frame. By getting rid of the extruding parts, I was able to zoom in more for a larger, simpler image.  

2) I got rid of the right "machine gun". I still want there to be  a sort of "machine gun" weapon for the final boss, but not one that I have to have any fancy animations for (like on the battleship, which was an absolute headache to code).  Below you can see a preview of the new version:

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"A game is a series of interesting choices. " -- Sid Meier

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

27 MAY 2023:

- This week's update ties in directly to the Quote of the Week. Last week's Final Boss design was ok, but not entirely to my liking. So this week I experimented with a new design that you can see above.  I like how this version has more symmetry and it's given me new inspiration for how the Final Boss battle should play out.

- I also made a cool beam attack animation in Embergen and tested it in-game. 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: 

"If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better." -- John Carmack

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

3 JUNE 2023:

- About halfway done with rendering some of the gun animations for the final boss. The left and right guns each have the three following states:

• Banking Left, Idle, Banking Right
• Damage level from 0 to 2
• Disabled status (0 or 1)

If my math is right  3x3x2 = 18 different states for the final boss.

I've always liked banking animations in shmups -- they make movement look so much more natural. Plus they also inform the player what direction the enemy is going in. Without banking animations, there is no telling if the enemy is going to move up, down, left or right until it actually starts doing so -- and by then it may be too late for the player!

Having played a good handful of indie shmups here on Itch I've noticed that the better ones try and do some sort of animation for the player or the enemies. Sure, it's more work (sometimes a lot of work) but it really does look better in the end. 

This week's update is a bit short since I had (another) business trip last week, but the following week or two should be back to normal.  

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"It is a beautiful truth that all men contain something of the artist in them." -- Walt Whitman

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

10 JUN 2023:

- Started programming the AI for the final boss. It can currently move in 8 different directions.

- Left and Right guns can be stunned and damaged (no animations yet).

- Aseprite came to the rescue when I was trying to figure out how to crop multiple frames of animation all in one go. This cropping will mean smaller file sizes for that animation and more accurate hit detection against the player.

- I'm being deliberately scarce on gifs and images of the final boss -- to me, they should always have a bit of mystery to them until finally encountered.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"I think that inside every adult is the heart of a child." -- Shigeru Miyamoto (Creator of Mario and Zelda)

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

24 JUN 2023:

- Started creating animations for when the final boss gets damaged.

- Perhaps more importantly, I created a subroutine that handles sprite sheets. For shorter animations, I've found that it's still best to cycle through them the old way, but for longer animations of 100 frames or more, this new  subroutine works splendidly! With sprite sheets I can pack more frames into a smaller space than if I loaded them in individually. For my sprite sheets I've been using TexturePacker which is really nice and intuitive.

- I also discovered (rediscovered?) the Sprite --> Trim feature in Aseprite, so I've been using that to get rid of any unnecessary transparency around the edges in some of the larger images. Simple but excellent way to reduce file size!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Constraint breeds creativity."                         (I heard this one when I was listening to Episode 71 of The Game Design Round Table podcast.)

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

1 JULY 2023:

- Still working on the final boss attacks and animations. 

- In Blender I was having issues where the lighting//coloring on half of an object was slightly different from the opposite side. This week I learned that it was because of my normals. Going into Edit mode, highlighting everything and pressing Shift + N reworked all the normals so that the lighting and coloring was consistent. 

- I'm up to 11,500 lines of code now, so I've been cleaning up the code so I don't run into . . .

- A bug. This one had me puzzled for several hours. Thankfully I just got it straightened out this morning. A bug like this can be pretty demoralizing but a combination of reviewing log files and looking at the code base from a previous version helped me find out what was wrong.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"When things get harder, and the obstacles get tougher, it just means you leveled up." -- Lilah Pace

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

8 JULY 2023:

- The final boss is coming along nicely! It actually looks and behaves a little differently than it did before. You can stun the left gun, the middle or the right gun individually -- and they're animated! The guns can also be damaged incrementally. 

- The only downside was that the final boss graphics took about 30MB (which for QB64 QBasic is a massive amount of data to load in). So I experimented with some different methods of drawing the sprites to the screen:

This is a WHOLE image. Notice all the dead space to the right of the gun. This makes the file size for this one frame 188 KB. Not cool. The only positives to this method is that 1) I can position every image off of the same upper left coordinate and 2) No cropping/trimming required.

This is  a CROPPED image. You can safely delete the dead space to the right of the gun and anything below the gun. This shrinks the file size down to 60.7 KB. Major improvement! It also benefits from making it easy to position. But some manual cropping is required to get it this way. 

This is a TRIMMED image. This is when Aseprite trims all around the image so that all dead space is deleted. This shrinks the file size down to 59.6 KB. Now that doesn't sound like much, but here's a comparison of the folder sizes using the 3 different methods:

WHOLE IMAGES = 30 MB                           CROPPED IMAGES = 23 MB                   TRIMMED IMAGES = 18 MB

Trimmed images almost halve the original folder size! So clearly that's the way to go. But there is one problem with trimming images. When Aseprite trims the image, it also trims away the original position in the upper left corner. So now the individual sprite segments that make up the final boss no longer align properly. 

To fix this, I took the cropped image width ( or height) and then subtracted the trimmed image width ( or height). This aligns all of the images properly. 

- Now that I finally figured all this out, I can apply this same logic to other enemies in the game. 

- I'm on Threads! It was really cool being able import my Instagram profile to Threads on Day 1. I plan on posting there a little more frequently than I do on Instagram and sharing my thoughts on gamedev and a few other things as well, so feel free to check it out!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

[This quote comes from Episode 75 of the Game Design Roundtable Podcast]

"If you can't make it good, make it short."

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

15 JULY 2023:

- Final Boss can now drop bombs! This is in addition to the beam cannon attack that it already has. Because the beam cannons are easy to dodge, the homing bombs force the player to move around the screen more. 

- At the moment, only one bomb can be dropped at a time, but I'd like there to be a possibility of multiple bombs dropping for increased difficulty. 

- Not a whole lot of progress this week as I was on vacation, but well-rested now and looking forward to more progress next week!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

Never beg for a seat when you can build your own table.

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

22 JULY 2023:

- Bombs now have an explosion animation! It's currently not very efficient (the sprite sheet is 2.8MB) but it works so I'm going to run with it unless I find a more practical solution. 

- Final Boss can now be destroyed. It's a nice challenge too! The bombs increase speed as the boss gets weaker. But the bombs will never outpace the player. Even so, you will be forced to move around a lot to avoid taking damage. 

- I also added text declaring how the final boss destroyed you (e.g. "The Final Boss hit you with its beam cannon", etc). 

- There is a bug that has been plaguing the bombs for a long time now -- sometimes they'll get "stuck" near the player and never detonate unless the player moves. It's very intermittent and therefore very hard to troubleshoot. It has to be fixed though so that will probably be one of my main focal points for next week.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Never be limited by other people's limited imaginations." -- Mae Jemison

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

29 JULY 2023:

- Bomb bug appears to be fixed. A huge part of that was reworking the log file code to facilitate better debugging. 

- I also figured out a way to consolidate the way enemy projectiles are handled. Now there is only one subroutine to handle the shots for battleships, the cargo boss, bombs and the final boss bombs. 

- My debug program is much improved now. The upper left of the screen shows what iteration of the game loop is currently being shown. This then matches up with the text in the log file so I can pinpoint what is going on in the code at a specific point in time. 

- Ok, so this last one is not Scrapship-related, but I was so amazed by this fact that I just have to share: Did you know that the clouds and bushes in Super Mario Bros use the same shape, just different colors? It’s true! Look it up on Google. I think that’s a good example of doing things efficiently. 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

“There’s a way to do it better — find it.” — Thomas Edison

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

5 AUG 2023:

- As it turns out, the bomb bug is NOT fixed.  In the GIF above, the bomb is supposed to either hit the engine or the cockpit. But it's hitting neither and just getting stuck. A look at my log file revealed that this is because, for either segment,  only 1 of the 2 coordinate positions were met. 

Basically the game is miscalculating what the player middle x and middle y coordinates are. So apparently I need to rework that -- which is fine because I planned to do that anyways. :)

- Not much else this week as I just got back from another business trip last night. 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"When the uncreative tell the creative what to do, it stops being art." -- Tony Bennett

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

12 AUG 2023:

- Bombers now have this cool scaling-down effect when they first appear on-screen! This was something I've been wanting to do for a while.  

- I was pressing CTRL + S to save in Aseprite when I noticed these coordinates pop-up on screen. They show you the x and y coordinates of where the trimmed image would be relative to the original image. Because of this, I did a test of trimming all the satellite images and then positioning them. This worked wonderfully and has 2 huge upsides: 1) Being able to trim away all that excess transparency = smaller images = shorter load times. 2) I can use QB64's _WIDTH and _HEIGHT functions to auto-return those values and use them for hit calculations! Now I just have to do this for the rest of the images in the game . . .

To get those coordinates, you press CTRL in Aseprite. Sometimes you may have to do the following for this to work: Make a stray mark anywhere transparent. Then get rid of it with the eraser. Then press CTRL and the coordinates should show up. 

- I also learned how to generate a Console screen in QB64 using $CONSOLE. This would be invaluable for debugging! The only problem is that the console window doesn't want to stay on top of the game screen where it would be most useful. 

- Started working on a subroutine so that the game will display properly at any resolution up to 2k or so. 

- Lots of work on the programming side to try and get things more consistent (naming conventions, etc). 

- A lot got done this week, but I also put in a lot more hours than usual. 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

 "Side content is meaningful because you can miss it." -- Joel Burgess (?)

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

19 AUG 2023:

Sometimes game design requires you to move backwards to move forwards.

 Though the game is 90% done now, there were a good handful of bugs that were impeding progress. I also didn't have any code for a critical aspect of the game: proper scaling for different screen resolutions. Instead of trying to fix bugs and implement scaling in a project with nearly 12,000 lines of code, I decided to "start over" -- which only means that I am starting with zero code and slowly adding things back in. 

And so far the results are amazing and well worth it! I've been putting in several hours a day so that has helped as well. 

- The game now scales properly up to the max screen resolution of 2560 x 1440. 

- The game starts in a Windowed Fullscreen mode that leaves the taskbar accessible. A press of the F key toggles Fullscreen mode.

- For the first time, you can exit the game or go Fullscreen while the game is loading. I accomplished this by embedding an "input listener" within each DO LOOP that loads the graphics.

- The settings screen has a nice little keyboard animation based on the keys the player actually presses. I had tried this before, didn't like the results and took it out; but the new version is pretty much perfect. 

- The sound and audio adjustment sliders don't have the "echo" effect bug if you hold down an arrow key for too long. 

- Text of any size can now be properly centered on the screen. (Last time I was just guesstimating the positions). 

- New troubleshooting tools include a logfile, a new buglist  and an in-game overlay that can be toggled on and off. It has already helped me solve a few problems. 

- In-game timers to keep track of how long it takes graphics to load. 

- 1,000+ lines of code have already been transferred over and re-worked. So it's going pretty quickly. 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: 

"Sometimes you have to move backward to get a step forward." -- Amar Bose

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

26 AUG 2023:

- Player ship explosion now has more of a 3D look to it. I can also change:

• Size of the particles
• Speed of the particles
• Duration of the animation

- Added option to skip the opening animation when starting the game. Can also be skipped while playing. Just about every game designer out there will tell you that animations/cutscenes should have a Skip button, regardless of how short they are.

- Settings can be accessed whenever the game is paused. Previously you could only access settings at the very beginning or between levels. 

- Assets are properly freed when you exit the game. This prevents memory leaks.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"It's better for AI to be stupid than for the player to be bored." -- Ananda Gupta (Game Design Roundtable Podcast #93)

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

2 SEP 2023:

- You can't have a game called Scrapship without lots of scrap! This game was somewhat inspired by the movie Gravity  -- especially the parts where space debris is flying everywhere (right GIF). I spent a lot of time this week re-working how the scrap moves. Previously it only moved left to right or right to left. But now scrap  starts small in the background and scales larger as it gets closer to the foreground. 

- Reworked how the player ship is "put together". It still uses segments, but in a such a way that hit detection against specific segments will be much more accurate.

- The selector "loops around" on the main menu screen. So if you're at the topmost list entry, pressing up will take you to the bottom of the list and vice versa. Saves the player some keystrokes.

- Added a player win condition to the main game loop.

- Improved subroutines that handle image, audio and sound loading.

- One thing Scrapship needs more of is backgrounds. I found a program called Space Engine Pro that sounds very promising, especially because it can generate a ton of space-related content that can be used commercially. If you have any experience with Space Engine Pro ( or know of a good alternative) please let me know in the comments!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"I see games . . . as the ultimate combination of art and technology." -- Todd Howard

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

9 SEP 2023:

- Collecting scrap is no longer a thing. Instead, they can hurt you -- as shown above -- or you can shoot them down. Shooting scrap will allow you to repair your ship between levels. 

- Scrap gets outlined in green when it is in range (to hit the player or be shot down). Aseprite has an excellent outline feature that made this part nice and easy!

- Added a sound effect every time the player gets hit.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary." -- Vince Lombardi

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

15 SEP 2023:

Doing this devlog a day early as I have a last-minute business trip scheduled for tomorrow.

- Increased the variety of scrap

- Satellite generates scrap that can be destroyed after a small delay

- The scrap from the satellite can also damage the player if you run into it

- Fixed the layering so that scrap is properly assigned "background" or "foreground" relative to all other objects

- Fixed a bug where the left and right wing segments were sheared off

There won't be any major Scrapship-related updates the next 2 weeks, but I'll think of something gamedev-related to post and of course the weekly quote.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Golden rule of level design -- Finish your first level last." -- John Romero

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

23 SEP 2023:

This week and next I’ll be talking about other stuff —no Scrapship updates this week as I’m still on my business trip. 

Thoughts on the Unity pricing scheme:

When you fill out an application to start a business, one of the fields you have to enter is something like “Purpose or goal of your business” and from the books I’ve read, the usual answer is “To make money”. So on the one hand, I understand that Unity is trying to do just that. But on the other hand, I do think they went about it the wrong way. It really did come across as if a bunch of suit-and-tie executives on the 40th floor made the decision without even thinking to talk to actual developers about the sort of impact this would have. 

It’s good that they walked it back, but like I’ve seen a lot of developers say, trust is hard to earn back. I totally agree. 

I do think this has underlined the importance of staying flexible with how a game is made. At the end of the day, game engines are like tools in a toolbox. Some are better at certain tasks than others, but a small hammer can still drive in a nail like a big hammer can. Or even a flat side of a large wrench. 

I’ve heard of a lot of Unity devs talking about switching to Godot or Unreal but I’d like to propose a third option — code the game yourself in C# (the scripting language Unity uses). Now you’re not even using a game engine and have ridiculous amounts of flexibility. And yes, there may be a steep learning curve. 

Scrapship is not made with a game engine. It is programmed in QB64PE which is a more functional, modern version of QBASIC. The freedom of programming a game from scratch is unparalleled. Anything I want to do, I can, assuming I know how to do it. Some people might think that you need to already be a “master” of a programming language to even start making a game — I’m telling you that you don’t. Prior to making Scrapship, my knowledge of QBASIC came from modifying existing programs back in High school and trying to make my own, a 20-year gap, and then watching a Youtube tutorial series before getting back into it. IF . . . THEN, DO . . . LOOP, etc were my initial building blocks and I just added on to that knowledge as I went along. 

All I’m saying is, keep your options open — some people even make games in Excel! 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

This week I’ll be recycling a quote from one of my favorite vloggers, Eva zu Beck, who is currently halfway through a 60 mile ultramarathon this weekend. 

Running  a marathon is a lot like making a game in that both require tremendous amounts of discipline — especially if you’re a solo developer. What Eva found helped her was coming up with a mantra that would help motivate her through the low points. In one of her vlogs, she shared what her mantra was: 

“I GET to do this.”

Instead of imagining running as something she had to do, she reframed it as something that she was privileged to do. As she points out in several of her videos, girls in Afghanistan can’t partake in a lot of sports that we take for granted. 

There are lots of us here on Itch trying to fulfill our dream of making a game, but there are some places in the world where making or even playing a game is probably unheard of. A quick look at Wikipedia shows that the only game from North Korea is “Pyongyang Racer”. How sad is that? 

So when you’re getting frustrated with your game development and ready to throw in the towel, just remember that you are doing this because it was a dream you had. No, it’s not something that you HAVE to do, it’s something that you GET to do. 

“I GET to do this.” 

30 SEP 2023

Last weekend of my business trip, then it’s back home and back to working on Scrapship!

While researching a quote for this week’s devlog, I came across some by the creator of The Sims, Will Wright:

“On vacation, I totally unplug. I don’t bring a laptop with me.”

“I find it refreshing to unplug from it for a while. You kind of forget how deeply you get embedded in it.”

Lacking context, I’m assuming the “it” he is referring to is “game development”. Assuming that’s the case, I totally agree. A vacation — or in my case, a business trip — can give one a pleasant rest from the rigors of making a game. 

So I haven’t been working on Scrapship the past 2 weeks, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been doing gamedev-related stuff. 

I’m already thinking about my next game. 

I won’t say too much about it yet — things can change — but it will make heavy use of procedural generation, emergent narrative, and persistent states. 

If that sounds overly ambitious, it may very well be, but to that end I’ve laid out several “guardrails” to ensure I don’t scope creep the hell out of it. 

But if it all works out, this game will be “infinitely” replayable. Even I as the developer will be finding new things all the time.

On this business trip I’ve already got a nice long list of notes for how different game mechanics will work. Some of these I have already prototyped in the past.    

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

“The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future.” — Gabe Newell

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

7 OCT 2023:

Finally back from my business trip (and very very jetlagged!) Nonetheless, here are this week's updates:

- Adjusted the "scrapstorm" so that it looks like the debris is hurtling towards you faster. 

- As shown above, not only the player, but the satellite can also be damaged by scrap now. It will look better when I make some explosions in Embergen.

- Fixed a nerve-wracking bug where the player shots were getting cut short after destroying some scrap. Like seriously, I spent more time fixing this bug than anything else this week. Thankfully I got it figured out just in the last hour or so. 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window." -- Steve Wozniak

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

14 OCT 2023:

- Spent a lot of time this week making explosions in Embergen! There are 4 just for the satellite:

• explosion after being hit by player's rapid laser
• explosion after being hit by player's scrap cannon
• explosion when a satellite segment is destroyed (shown above)
• explosion when the entire satellite is destroyed (shown above)

- Explosions can be a little random by having a different angle at which they're drawn. I had also experimented with random scale, but that complicated positioning and images scaled larger just don't look as good as 1:1 images. 

OTHER NEWS:

- Recently finished listening to episode 104 of the Game Design Round Table podcast. It mentioned a good website, whose writer is the source of this week's quote.

- I also came across this website that features news from around the video game industry.

- Haven't had too much time to play games, but I have enjoyed a couple hours with The Bloodline. It's basically a low-poly Skyrim made by a single indie developer. I asked him on Instagram how long he had been working with Unreal Engine 4 and he said "about 4 years", which sounds very reasonable for a project of that scope. 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"Many players cannot help approaching a game as an optimization puzzle." -- Soren Johnson

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

21 OCT 2023:

This week I started looking at my options for making backgrounds in Scrapship.

The main goal is to have a wide variety. Every time you play a level, there should be a good chance that the background will be different. 

So far I’ve tried: 

• Blender — I can make good planets — if I have good textures to work with. Can’t really get much of a bloom effect though when saving with transparency.
• Unreal Engine 4 — Same as above, but does a better job of creating an atmosphere effect.
• Textures for Planets — Has the ability to make tons of different planet textures — but at a lower resolution. 
• Space Engine Pro — Lots of realistic variety and uses transparency, but in some of my testing the resolution is still too low.

- Above is a screenshot with an Asteroid background from Space Engine (jpg format). Looks nice, but the downside to jpg is that it will make it more difficult to create dynamic backgrounds that don’t conflict with different layers. PNG format can fix this, but at an often huge cost in file size. 

Currently I plan on working with Space Engine Pro some more to see what I can do, but I am also looking at another option:

GEOGEN!

So JangaFX, the company that creates Embergen (which is what I’m using for explosion effects), just recently announced that they are making GEOGEN which will allow one to make planets and geographical textures. From what I gather, it’s around the beta stage, so I might have to wait a while if I want to try it out.  (I am not affiliated with JangaFX btw, but I do like their software). 

Currently on a business trip this week and next, so there won’t be much in the way of Scrapship updates, but of course I’ll think of something to post.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

“Ideas are easy, games are hard.” — Rob Daviau (episode 105 of the Game Design Round Table podcast)

(The context behind this quote was if game developers should be cautious about sharing ideas for upcoming games they want to make. In his estimation, one shouldn’t be too worried — even if you have a great idea, actually turning it into a reality is such hard work that it is unlikely that someone would try and steal your idea and beat you to market.)

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

28 OCT 2023:

Just got back from my business trip last night. Since there are no Scrapship updates for this week I'll share with you the latest cool gamedev-related things I've come across:

• Saw a really good YT video between Jordan Peterson and Robert Sapolsky where they discussed Game Theory as applied to human behavior. Very deep discussion! Watch the video for +10 to your Intelligence.
• In particular, I found this gem in the comments section. Great stuff if you're contemplating the next Skyrim or Dwarf Fortress. The post was by @BillWiltfong

This is the best talk anyone has ever done for giving game designers ideas on how to describe and stat out a human race in a fantasy RPG.

"Humans are the race of people who are driven, never satisfied, always yearning for a future they can never see. The limitations of their lifespans, far shorter than those of elves and dwarves, produces a people who strive in everything they do to transcend the limitations of their finite lives. Yes, they yearn for an eternity they cannot fathom, but the only means by which they can reach it is to find the greatest struggle, and face off against it. This is why humans have spread further from their homelands than any other race, and why humans are found in every climate and every niche. If it can be done, humans will find how it must be done, for the only option for a human to fail, and yet continue on in another lifetime with another effort, is to give the future to his or her offspring, set and prepared for even greater works."

- Also saw this Star Engine Tech Demo which looks really promising for the future of game engines. The real test though will be how easy it is to work with and how much support it gets. 24 minutes well-spent!

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"The path of maximal adventure is better than the path of infantile satiation." -- Jordan Peterson (from the video mentioned above, 1:21:42)

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

4 NOV 2023:

- Made lots of 4k backgrounds with Space Engine Pro this week. Steam says I've used the program for about 15 hours.

- The backgrounds are oversized jpg images that are then compressed, using this awesome online tool that I found. Compressing the images decreased the initial load time by half! Nice! Because the images are oversized, I can position them on the screen with a little variation.

- I continued working on planets as "middleground" objects and to give a slight parallax effect. But there were 3 problems:

• Although Space Engine Pro can generate png's with transparency, it can only go up to 1024 resolution (in skybox mode). So all the renders were not very detailed.
• Even small png's caused the game to lag noticeably.
• Getting the planets to look right during level transitions was . . . not impossible, but not worth the effort that would be required to get it working properly.

- Obviously performance is better than "looking cool" so I made the decision to scrap the "middleground" planets entirely. 

- When a level is completed, the player will warp to the next. Above you can see a preview of that (minus the railgun which I haven't added back in yet). 

IN OTHER NEWS:

- Started playing Red Dead Redemption 2. All I have to say is, wow, the level of immersion and detail in that game is amazing. There were quite a few parts that felt more like a movie than a game.  

- Have you ever thought about how much you spend on Steam? I made a spreadsheet and calculated that I've spent over $800 on games -- most of which I haven't completed or even play anymore. Sad, isn't it? As a result, an early resolution of mine is to only buy games that are on sale.

- Star Ocean: the Second Story R just released -- so it's definitely not on sale -- but they did have a demo. And what a demo it is! I remember playing the original on the PS1 and couldn't get into it. But this new version is just fantastic! Loving the 2.5D art style.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

"True creativity flows only from stillness." -- Eckhart Tolle

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