1 APR 2020:

- Above you can see an early prototype where the player destroys an enemy ship, comes in contact with the power-up (W for wide shot). The upgraded green laser is wider and does double damage. 

2 APR 2020:

- Lots of planet work today! Made the planet smaller for slightly faster load times. Next, I rendered the cloud layer separately from the terrain layer and raised it slightly off the main sphere. What do you think, is it less marble-like now? 

- Started added some voice overs to signal key events (health low, etc). Audio level can be set independently from sound level as seen in the title screen options above.

A new demo will be out toward the end of the month, but in the meantime the latest demo can be found at the link below . . .

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

3 APR 2020:

- Continued work on the laser powerups. Laser upgrades twice, getting wider and dealing more damage each time.

- Player ship now has mini explosion animations when it gets hit.

4 APR 2020:

- Added a new ship today! It flies across the screen and fires a projectile straight down as it passes over the player.

- Slight modification to the weapon power-ups icons and effects.

- Almost forgot, yes, I'm still playing around with different planet effects.

Currently I think the new ship (in black) looks a little bit too big compared to the Cruiser (in blue).

What do you think, does the new ship need to be scaled down a bit? 

5 APR 2020:

- Improved the hit detection. Instant death only in very obvious ship collisions. "Grazing" causes minor damage and gives the player a chance to evade.

- Added a pause button. Play resumes after any keypress.

6 APR 2020:

- Further hit detection and bomber movement improvements. 

- Several more spaceships are ready to be added to the game. No more pixel graphics! These spaceships are all made in Blender!

While I'm waiting for certain things to get accomplished, I'm basically just making minor improvements. To that end, it would be very helpful if I could get some feedback either here or via Roast My Game. I've already made a couple adjustments based on feedback from my Instagram followers and readers.

Help roast my game: https://roastmygame.com/game/scrapship #gamedev

7 APR 2020:

- New fighters! These were created in Blender by @another_blender_user.

- The game now has 3 functional enemy ships (fighter, bomber, cruiser). Just need to refine hitboxes, damage, image size, etc.

- Had more voice-over audio recorded last night.

- Added stats to the end of the game showing how many of each type of ship was shot down.

8 APR 2020:

- Added shields to the fighter ships. The shields get smaller as they absorb more hits.

- Cruisers now warp into action!

- Fixed an issue where the player ship wouldn't touch the top of the screen. Also fixed enemy spawn placement issues. Fixed another issue where player ship would explode at the top of the screen.

9 APR 2020:

- Added some frames of animation to show that the player's bullets were hitting the shield of the fighters.

- Currently tweaking the explosion effects and implementing some logic so that some shots will be misses.

10 APR 2020:

- Power-up update!
In previous versions (including the demo) the player could change the weapon by pressing the "C" button. Now, destroyed enemies drop icons that can change weapons for you!

11 APR 2020:

- New weapon: The Scrapcannon! All the orbital scrap that the player collects ultimately ends up becoming the ammunition for the best weapon in the game. 

12 APR 2020:

- Above GIF shows the icon-based weapon-swap mechanic. Seconds are indicated by dots and weapon type is indicated by the large letter. 

After shooting an enemy down, an icon appears. If collected in the first 5 seconds, one switches to the default single laser. If one waits for the R, they then have 3 seconds to switch to the rapid laser. (And if one waits still longer, they have 2 seconds to switch to the Scrapcannon). 

What I like about this design is that it prevents the player from having to press a button to change a weapon and also injects a little bit of strategy -- you can get any weapon you want, as long as you can get to it safely and are willing to wait a few seconds for it.

The icon vanishes forever after the last weapon icon cycles through . . . so you got to get it while it's still active! If you need to change weapons again you'll have to destroy something else to spawn another icon.

- Right now the game has 5 sound effects (created by @mariosello1) and some voice-over audio. I'm currently working on getting some music created for the game.

13 APR 2020:

- The rotating planet now moves down and off the screen slowly as the level progresses. As a result, I was able to cut down the game's file size from about 50MB  to 20MB and reduced load times from 10 seconds to 3 seconds.

- Enemies are now gradually introduced. The hard-to-kill Cruisers do not join the fight until all of the fighters or bombers have been shot down.

- Bombers fly horizontally below the Cruisers but above the player's default starting location. Helps prevent getting side-swiped.

- Slightly decreased the default SFX volume.

14 APR 2020:

- Redid the planet terrain texture and brightened the clouds. Terrain and clouds now rotate one degree at a time. I've done lots of little adjustments but I think I finally have the planet looking and behaving the way I'd like. 

16 APR 2020:

- Rapid laser and scrap cannon increase firing speed each time they're leveled up.

- I've been using Pyxel Edit, Paint and HeliosPaint at various times for certain graphics. Though some of these programs are pretty good, my artistic ability is lacking, even if I'm trying to make something as "simple" as a pixelated explosion. So now I'm using BlastFX for my explosions and already I can see improvements in appearance.