Friday, August 29, 2014

Locations lights and shadows - mechanic

As you cruise the vast space with your ship you may encounter places like asteroids with caverns, derelicts and face events in which you may not have full visibility to see ahead, in those cases your crew will be able to turn on their helmet's lights and show up a portion of the screen. Here is a screenshot in-game with the shadows casted by your own crew, some parts of the ships are not fully visible due to the lack of lights.


In some other situations you may decide to turn off completely your ship to avoid detection, you won't be able to maneuver or activate any other system so only your main control center will have auxiliary lights like the red ones below, but the rest of the ship will be in complete darkness, your crew will have manage that on their own.


Low visibility affect accuracy and many things will not be available to your crew to attack or repair for example. Exploring unknown locations like caverns or dereclicts will have similar setup with limited visibility to the unknown, so you will have to be careful how you deploy your crew in the map and how to interact and advance forward, there may be enemies hiding in the shadows...

Saturday, August 2, 2014

One year ago I started a summer challenge...

I just noticed today that exactly one year ago I started my summer challenge, to make a new game and put some new ideas on it during the summer and at the end I am still working on it adding lots of new features and having a lot of fun working on it. Junkcraft Armada is becoming the space game I wanted to play, travel through the universe, handle your crew, do some jobs and complete a mission by saving the universe, it is a quite ambitious game since there are a lots of assets and a lot of procedural content, a roguelike adventure.

Here is a new screen of the latest update.

You can set your weapons to target specific parts of an enemy ship, so you can disable thrusters, or hit a fuel storage module for a big explosion and disable more parts of an enemy ship. Depending on your sensors power you will be able to see more details on the enemy ship, like module status and some of the upgrades so you can plan your attack.

This week also, I rewrote all the weapons code and now it is very easy for me to add many different weapons without having to customize in code much, so a wide variety of weapons will be introduced in the next few weeks, initially I was planning for 5 different types of weapons but now I have way more and still growing. I added beam lasers which took me most of the week to implement due to the collision detection algorithm but now it is working.

Just a quick screen showing up a beam weapon firing.




Many more features coming soon, just hoping to finish the game before the end of the year crossing fingers.