May 27 2011

WHEELS

I’ve had a busy day messing with cars, but I found some time and did some sprite work.

This is just a first pass for their van.

Vehicles are easy to do side-on (or top-down). There are blueprints online for just about any common vehicle you can think of. Pixelling them is just a matter of picking the important details, ditching the rest, and shading.

I did the whole thing inside a screenshot of Fear Is Vigilance with Marcy up front, just for colour and size reference and so I could see at a glance if it was fitting in. It’s most of the way there – the next step will be dirtying it up, because it’s wayyyy too shiny and new to be their van right now. Being well funded just doesn’t seem in character.

The perspective seems a bit awkward, but the van won’t be used in this scene. It’ll be used in driving cutscenes where the viewpoint is more obviously side-on. I’ll get them done over the weekend and through next week, and wrap the game up soon after 🙂

May 26 2011

CONTRACT

I totally forgot to update yesterday! Reason is, I’m doing a few days’ neat contract work that came up. Sorry. Normal service will resume on Friday as I get back on Vigilance. 😀

May 23 2011

FLASH PRELOADER WITH HAXE 2.07

I spent a few hours last week getting a preloader to work. All the info I could find was obsolete, so I thought I’d write up a quick how-to for the current version of HaXe. My preloader’s based on the general approach explained here: code on frame 1 of the .swf, resources on frame 2.

May 20 2011

TROUBLE IN THE FOREST

Today’s soundtrack:

Yep – I’ve been drawing trees! I think they came out quite well:

I’m currently debating whether to set up parallax layers so you get to see more of the city backdrop or whether to just leave it as is. “As is” is winning.

Yesterday’s work was far less dramatic. I set up a preloader, a pause screen when the game loses focus and the ability to mute the music. The reason this stuff took an entire day is the preloader! HaXe simply isn’t set up for it, and every single tutorial on the Internet no longer works with the current version. I’ll do a technical how-to on Monday.

What I haven’t done yet are the actual title and ending sequences, so there’re still a few days work to do on Vigilance before I’m ready to ship it. It’s a shame I won’t have it finished by the end of Ludum Dare judging, but that’s totally my fault. It won’t be long 😀

Once it’s done I’ll be starting my first search for sponsorship and a little income. I’m excited!

May 18 2011

DIVERSION

OKAY so Witcher 2 activated yesterday morning. Since then I have been playing Witcher 2. It is a good thing I am my own boss or I might fire me.

It’s a pretty good game! Even so, being impulsive enough to play newly released games during official Work Time is bad and I will stop it, otherwise this week’s blog entries are going to be pretty sad and lonely.

Incidentally, if you’re getting Witcher 2, for goodness’ sake don’t put it on Hard. It is brutally tough in a quite unusual way. I’m quite concerned that there’s another difficulty level above this one. Jim from RPS says it gets a lot easier later on, which sounds nice; as it is I’m getting killed a bunch of times in every significant battle and I think I might be stuck on a boss fight.

On the plus side, I’m not sure I’d mind restarting on Normal even if I have to. There have already been several things I’d like to try doing another way.

RPS have just put up their review if you’re pondering.

May 16 2011

TREES

Hate ’em. They’re jerks and they’re hard to draw, because they’re not made of boxes.

I’m spending this week on my latest Ludum Dare game, Vigilance. I’ve got tons to do, starting from “adding a pause button” and working up from there – but the first thing I wanted to sort out was the backgrounds. I’ve got the park background up to a reasonable-ish standard now…

Instant improvement! But it’s still lacking the actual trees and bushes you’re meant to be able to hide in of a night time. I’ll get back to trees tomorrow.

Besides the backgrounds, I’ve made a bunch of bugfixes and minor tweaks, mostly to the character AI and chat boxes. For the rest of the week, I’ve probably got 3 days work to do on essentials like a preloader, intro, decent ending, pause button and so on to make it feel like a complete game. Here’s hoping I have time for actual gameplay changes!

May 13 2011

GET TO THE CHOPPER

Homing attacks are proceeding acceptably. Here is the first ship from Sector 2 in action:

That’s the new attack helicopter. Its secondary attack is deploying those homing missiles. The missiles can be shot down, but they’re fast! It’s perhaps easier just to dodge them until they run out of fuel and tumble off screen.

It’s a neat weapon. I am looking forward to making some kind of boss which periodically unleashes a vast missile Armageddon.

May 12 2011

MISSILE

Spent Wednesday hanging out with Hanzonaut, talking concepts, getting drunk, playing Test Drive Unlimited 2. Good times. So this update’s a day late and a bit light.

Random good news – Vigilance won Bytejacker’s Free Indie Rapid Fire this week! It was a shootout between three Ludum Dare games and my game was selected and took it home with 65% of the votes. Pretty awesome! More incentive to spend next week polishing this game up and find it a permanent home on the internet.

Back to FIGHT BACK! I haven’t implemented anything for the new stages yet but I’ve spent the time brainstorming and I have pretty solid concepts in mind now. Sector 2 will be about homing attacks, suicide ships, and giant frickin’ lasers. Sector 3 will be about EPIC THINGS IN SPACE, like asteroid fields, warpgates, floating weapons platforms with turrets on, and battleships which span multiple waves. Sector 4 will be about… well, I’m not sure yet, but I want to work in ships that arrive on screen in a chrysalis that takes 5-10 seconds to ‘hatch’. I might work in semi-organic ships at some point. The concept for sector 4 is just to mash everything so far together with a few new boss ships. That might not be enough… but we’ll see.

Pickup-wise, I’m planning to add a homing missiles pickup in sector 2 and an aimable turret in sector 3 which you’ll be able to fire around at random angles. I think that ought to be a decent mix.

May 09 2011

MAKING WAVES

Well, I’ve fixed the new ship type.

Instead of moving forwards and firing sideways, it hangs around like anything else and constantly shoots diagonally in a shallow V.
It’s now fast but it accelerates slowly, taking time to build up speed, and taking time to stop again after a motion. That makes it feel ‘heavy’ and be slow to react, but it’s still capable of crossing the playfield quickly.

Amusingly enough this makes it more like a ‘heavy’ fighter in Street Fighter/DoA etc., ie. Fight Back’s inspiration, rather than a ‘heavy’ ship in a traditional vertical shmup. I tried to bring in some shmup inspiration and ended up coming back to fighting games for ideas – I guess though Fight Back’s a shmup in presentation it’s a fighter in feel, and minor elements you’d expect from fighters feel more comfortable.

With those tweaks it serves the same purpose – cutting the play space up – but it can get to things quickly and be awesome to play as, just like any other ship. I think I’m happy with this kind of heavy ship now.

Next up is figuring out sectors two through four! With that in mind I’ve been redoing how the ships are set up for each wave.

May 06 2011

SLOW AND STEADY

I’ve been experimenting today with a new type of ship in Fight Back. A whole new class of ship, in fact.

The “Barrage” ship, namely that fat thing that’s firing sideways, has no AI whatsoever and flies steadily down the screen and off the other side, periodically shooting sideways. Slow, heavy ships like this are a traditional way of mixing up the pace in shmups, so I thought I’d give them a shot.

Turns out they’re (predictably) rubbish to play as because they’re so slow. I tried turning them into a kind of ship that can’t be player-controlled, but turns out that’s confusing, as the rules suddenly get more complicated. It’s also diluting the uniqueness of Fight Back by nullifying its core concept.

In short, I need to either find a way to make this ship concept (a heavily-armoured, slow-moving obstacle that fires sideways and cuts up the play space in a consistent fashion) fun to play or I need to ditch it. I’d really like to be able to keep it, since workable designs for some common slow, heavy ships would give Fight Back way more variety in action. Guess I’ll have to think on it over the weekend!