Milestone Two, Complete!
Well that is a wrap on the M2 Milestone. It was a busy month and a lot went in this month to flesh out the basics and get something that was playable.
While still a rough implementation, I have a basic functioning demo now. Nothing fancy yet, but you can run around the test level, shoot and take out the bad guys, and be shot and die as they chase you down. All the while listening to the same sound track over and over to help drive home the space madness 🙂
Feedback so far has been positive and inline with the items that are yet to come or be fixed, so it’s kind of nice that everyone and everything is already on the same page. I guess that means I’ve managed to convey my idea fairly well so far. I’ve also got a small story line brewing, nothing big just to give the game more context beyond the current “Aliens baddddd! You Goodddddd! Kill, Kill, Killlll!”.
New poster art, a combo of screen caps, AI, reference art, and a bunch of phototshop work.
In this month I added basic audio for the shooting sounds, a background music track. Changed up the poster art to be more what I was envisioning with a art deco style. There is now a basic menu system and load screen, the enemies now properly chase and shoot at you, as well as a few big fixes. I also put into place task tracking with Jira as thins project is quickly growing in size and just trying to remember what to do won’t fly and a confluence page where I fleshed out the game design doc in a little more detail as opposed to just “Make a SmashTV like game”, setup notes, feedback on the milestones as I have friends playtest, and so on. You get the idea!
Most notably the enemies no longer float (although they can still share a spawn point with background scatter) and they rotate to face and follow you when you move into their sphere of influence. The camera has also been adjusted to be top down as intended to throw back to the games I’m referring to for inspiration most notably Super SmashTV on the SNES.
Another big fix was the character shooting, the projectiles were inheriting the movement of the character, while could be handy at times to just twirl around and take everything out, it wasn’t intended or very realistic! That, once I managed to find the problem was a simple fix, I was attaching my spawn to the weapon and didn’t need to be.
I also pulled out the inner columns from the map as they just looked liked too much clutter and didn’t really add anything to the visuals. The doors right now I’m still on the fence about, there is still a problem where doors are sometimes being populated in the middle of a room as a room, and I’m not 100% sure how to fix that yet. As the levels will be procedurally generated, but not randomly on the fly, I might pull them and manually place doors, and doors of different types when I build out the levels.
Next steps? Well October is going to be a busy month of getting some big fixes in, refining some of the existing systems, such as the enemy tracking, and moving the attack from a basic collision test to a tracing system for more accuracy. I will start fleshing out the first 10 levels. There will be another 2 enemies, and turret guns going in, as well a end boss to battle to complete the level.
Crazy lasers following character movement fixed!
We have menu sign!
Currently there is no indication at your health as you can take 8 shots before dying, so I’ll by putting in some AI as well as refining the health system. I don’t want the game to be to, difficult on normal as in one shot and you die like in the classics, so every 10 seconds or so that you don’t take a hit, your life will replenish much like the shield system in Halo. But your health will be reduced down from what it currently is to account for that.
The biggest thing that will be changing and that will be the first task for the month will be moving from the existing control scheme to a twin stick control scheme that works on the controller and something of a similar vein for keyboard and touch. The level generator also has a couple things happening in the construction script that I need to migrate over to the event graph.
New Low Poly Sci-Fi Assets!
Last but not least, I bit the bullet on 8 low poly Sci-Fi asset packs that suit the style I’ve currently got, so I need to go through those in the first week and start migrating items over to use in game. This should give me a lot of items to use for set dressing out the levels.
That really is a fair amount to get done, hopefully if I can finish early enough I can start getting some FX in like explosions, better lasers on the shooting, better lighting and atmosphere, and better audio. If I don’t though, that’ll be for November, but we’ll see what I can get through this month. I’d like to have everything completed before end of December, so hopefully I’m not being too ambitious doing all this on my own, and trying to target 3 different platforms, PC, Mac, and iOS.
Enough talk; time to get deving!
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