Junkcraft Armada update

Things are moving fast and in good shape, take a look at the first sample screen capture of Junkcraft Armada, which started as my summer challenge game that was supposed to end after 2 weeks but already working on it for about 1 month.

This is about a modular spaceship game, build/design your ship while you play, explore, escort or help transport ships, exterminate pirates and use the remaining modules as part of your ship or recycle them for parts for upgrades or repairs with more than 20 different module types, more than 10 different missions and many different environments that affect how you maneuver and survive, black holes, white holes and many other space anomalies , choose the power distribution of your ship between weapons, shields, thrusters, tractor beams, and many other modules.

The game is physics driven so expect things to behave like in space, you just drift in space even if your thrusters are off after initial acceleration, get your thrusters damaged and you will have some challenges flying/turning your ship, module's mass and many other factors affect how your ship fly and how fast it can accelerate with many different weapons like energy weapons, kinetic weapons with limited ammo/missiles/torpedos and you can upgrade any module up to 5 levels, with only one life expect to have a though time trying to get to the end, get your command center killed and you are done.

Most of the texture modules are just placeholders at this moment and this is a pre-alpha screen captudre just to test how it works.

Summer Challenge end...but not so...

For this summer, I set a challenge to make a game in 2 weeks, at the end of those 2 week I had a running game, "Junkcraft Armada" with around 19 modules enabled, and a single level  with was just kill all the enemies that came to you, I had only 3 kinds of enemies at that time and very simple layout with a very minimalistic UI and no sound at all and no menu, just go to action and kill some time. It was a great experience since I do want to use this to build new games in the future.

So what's next for me? well I had so much fun doing this game, and looking at the state of it at the end of the 2 weeks challenge I don't think I should leave it as it is now, it won't make justice to those 2 weeks of effort. So I decided to extend the time a little bit more, to make it a complete game, it is very fun for me to play it, but it can get boring with just 3 enemies, and no missions and progress, so in the last 2 weeks I enabled different scenarios and a few more enemies, I am thinking to add about 30 enemies to the game and bosses since it is extremelly easy for me to crate one, it takes about 5 minutes for small ships. I wanted to create random enemies by using an AI builder, but even if that tool provides interesting results it will take quite a lot of effort to make just to have some reasonable ship design, so for this version, I will create the enemies and that should bemore than enough, and maybe add the AI builder for a next version for infinite fun and challenge.

What else will I add? different missions, I have 14 types in mind now with different variations and one is finished, add more random events and more environment hazards, plus more upgrades and maybe a few more weapons, I don't want to make a big game with it but more like a rogue like game, adding variety will make it easier and enjoyable to play. So I hope to finish it in the next 2 to 3 weeks so I can return to Elem3ntz! and finish that big game.

Little bit late, but here is the first screenshot - Junkcraft Armada - Summer Challenge

It took me more time than I was expecting to finish the basic collision detection system and get the proper modules damaged, instead of spending one day on it spent twice, so I have one day less for other things, but still looks promising.

Here is the first screenshot of  "Junkcraft Armada" game, my 2 weeks summer challenge project in which you design and equip your ship, get junk parts from the enemies you destroy on the way and upgrade/equip your ship with those parts, upgrade your parts with scrap materials or buy/sell parts at the space station. This screenshot has all the major modules for testing but when you start the game you will only have a very small module and limited weapons.

Physics play a great role in this game, so any part you add to your ship will affect how it fly in space, gravity of stars will make it difficult to maneuver around those areas and nebulas and other things may speed down your movement due to space dust and other things. There are still many ideas I want to implement, but first is to make the framework work together.

The graphics of the game at this moment are just simple placeholders, if I find more time I will improve them after the challenge is finished. Last night I implemented a very simple skin system, so I could have more than one skin for the same module, this will allow a nice looking spaceship, players will be able to select different skins to make it look better but functionality will be the same.

Another day , another challenge resolved

One more day has passed, and another challenge resolved, I spent a day programming the virtual cameras and weapons systems, the rudimentary UI and weapon selection is also working, ammo, missiles and torpedo additional storage modules are working now and firing is working finally. Still need time to implement the use of the energy distribution system which I may not be able to implement due to lack of time, but I will try my best.

Since only one week is left, I am wondering if I will have enough time to develop the ship editor, since at this moment I am creating ships in notepad the editor will be crucial to the final game to add different modules and create different shapes, most probably I will need about 2 days from the next week to implement it. Today's task is to write and finish the collision detection algoritm so finally weapons can do some serious damage!, not sure if I can make a very robust collision detection algorithm between ship to ship.

One idea that I am looking to implement is the ability to just crash your ship against the enemy, let's say is your last enemy and you run out of ammo and your laser guns are destroyed, what else can you do? just crash your ship and self destruct it to kill your last enemy, pretty neat idea, but for that I need to have the ship to ship collision detection working and one more module, the escape pod module, so you and your crew can escape your final destiny and save the day. And of course, you only have one life, you die and is over, I want the player to be very serious while playing this game, have fun and feel the pressure that while playing the game it is like real life, you only have one life so don't do stupid things, at least at the beginning, I may decide to implement a legacy option, so you can store some of the stuff you have in the bank or depot  or something like that for your next play, but I may not too, it all depends on the time left!, but if the game ends up being very fun, I may do a second version later. And I also have the name of the game now, I will post some screens and the name of the game in my next post.

5 days so far and great progress

I've been working on my summer challenge for just around 5 days and made great progress and is so refreshing to switch to a new project for a short period of time. So far the game is going to be a space ship design and management with random battles in space, not sure how much I will be able to put inside the game given that I only have a little bit more than a week to finish the playable version, have the idea to add space stations to explore, gravity areas, nebulas with storms that will affect your systems, all in a random universe. The basic idea to work on your ship is to destroy enemies and capture parts to upgrade/expand your ship, or go to the shop and sell some of useless modules.

So far, I have added 19 different modules including weapons, energy reactor, tractor beams, shields and many others, the graphics are pretty basic at the moment just to be able to test my ideas and if the game works nicely I may spend more time later for a graphic revamp. The most difficult part in the first few days was to actually made the physics engine to work properly, it is made as accurate as possible so when building or upgrading your ship you will have to think about the mass you are adding to it and how it will affect your navigation, trusters are very important to maneuver your ship properly and getting some damage in battle will really affect your propulsion system. Getting enough ammo in your ship's storage will be challenging, so you can't just fire everything you have all the time, energy weapons are the cheapest to use since those will depend on your energy generator. Not quite sure if I will have the time to add the fuel module yet plus many others that I have in mind, at least this version will have the basic 19 or 20 modules at the beginning.

I will post some prototype pictures by the end of the week, hopefully I will be able to make the weapons systems to work by then.

The 2 weeks challenge...

I haven't updated the blog and the game that much lately, I've been very busy with other things and I took a small break after many years, now I feel refreshed, so I decided to take a small refreshing challenge to warm up and started a new game, but there is a catch, I will only spend 2 weeks on it and see how it goes.

I will publish by the end of the week the game progress, so far I had many ideas for my next game after finished Elem3ntz! , and I have already decided the game mechanics, but since it may take very long to finish the whole thing I decided a new strategy. The next 2 weeks will be used to build the foundation of the game and release a playable game with it, it will be very simple but it will allow me to test the basic ideas and physics. So far in the last 2 days I've been able to finish the basic physics engine and have it moving! I am pretty excited since I couldn't imagine how to do it until I started coding it and works pretty nice. Stay tuned for some small micro updates by the end of the week.

In the next two weeks I will have to finish a small spaceship game based on physics.

More characters

In the last few weeks I've been trying to finish as many animations as I could, I ended up with 13 animations per character so far, and each is around 60 FPS as a minimum so I have a lot of work to do, even if I use parts like flash animations, I do a lot more to animate the parts than just rotate a piece or scale, there are a lot of small things going on on the cloths for example that adds an extra touch, also on the faces, sometimes you can feel that is like 3D, but actually everything is just 2D.

Still 2 more characters to finish and 1 needs complete design, after that level design follows and the game will be almost ready, since most of the framework is already done, music is another topic since I am learning now how to write music for the game, if I can't make anything exciting I may end up hiring someone, but I would like to be able to make eveything in this game by myself and see how it goes.

Here are some new sample animations.

This last one took quite a lot of time to get it done since it is all frame by frame drawn and painted, it may looks like a simple painting job, but there are quite many tricks inside for the cloth color change that brings. Like this:

You can see some of the palettes here with the same texture I can get very different looks by using a more planned palette placement.