New designs, new shadows, new shaders

Lots of updates and many new skins added to the game, it is taking quite a lot of time to do blog updates because I am having a lot of fun designing new ships and other things. Took over a week to redesign the shaders to calculate shadows on the fly, now that the new shader is working along with the normal maps you will be able to see even more details on each of the modules.

For example this is one of the new ships:

And ow trying to dock to a newly designed space station (still WIP) for repairs , trading and other things.

Also, you can upgrade or sell modules, sometimes you may be able to recover debris or modules from defeated enemies, plug em into your ship and sell them in your next stop and get some quick cash, in this screen you will be able to sell your excess modules.

 

 

Some other ships added.

More screens to come soon.

Handling events and how complex can it be...

Lately I've been adding new events into the game, just to illustrate how events are being handled here is a screenshot.

There are quite many different options that happen on each event so there is a lot of dynamic part based on decisions you made in the past, for example this event is called when the player hails a pirate ship, there are many random parts of the event and the response and options the player will see depend on the crew, your resources, your cargo and many other factors, those will affect what the player will see when playing. So each gameplay will be different and decisions made during those events will change also future events, for example if the player decides to join the pirates guild there will be a few occasions in which that option will be available, fail to do so and the option will never be available, or if player refuse to do so the pirates will remember that and will respond accordingly.

Another example of how decisions affect your crew, for example giving up your cargo without a fight will affect your crew member's loyalty, some are really blood thirsty and won't give up without a fight till dead, some others will be fine, so you need to know your crew, and remember that if loyalty goes to low, you may face a mutiny! or something worse.

Now time to go back and write more stories and make more shaders.

Junkcraft Armada

Junkcraft Armada is a 2d modular spaceship game, build/design your ship while you play, explore, escort or help other 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, 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, mass of modules and many other factors affect how your ship fly and how fast it can accelerate. Many different weapons like energy weapons and kinetic weapons with limited ammo/missiles/torpedos, and only one life expect to have a though time trying to get to the end, get your command center destroyed and you are done.

Board ships to help others or to take over enemy ships, defend yourself from space pirates and more!

Some screenshot under alpha development now.

Elem3ntz! update

Elem3ntz! is a puzzle game about using natural elements, combine them and use the results against your enemies, it is still in development and is planned to be released by the end of 2014 after the release of Junkcraft Armada.

Here are some screenshots of the game still in alpha version.

Generic event handler

I've been testing a little bit more the event handler in-game and added a few things into it.

Individual properties were added to each event, so properties can define specific behaviors for each event node, so I can define a node as possible answer or a text to be displayed. It is making a lot of difference to have all the event management outside the main game so it is a lot simpler now to link events to outcomes. I am still wondering why there isn't any tool like this to make things "easier" for state management.

For sure this is not the fastest way to process events since you can directly code yourself all what you need, but coding takes time and effort and trying to keep track of every condition is very hard, this tool is helping me so far to overcome my mind limits and visualize more what is happening around, and that saves me much more time in the long run. At this moment I am wiring up all the variables in the event management system to in-game variables. This will also allow me to make things happen without having to code much later, since all the conditions and requirements are included inside the tool.

Generic Event handler, can even handle dialog trees and more...

I became confused with too much content and how I ended up managing this in an easier way.

Until recently I used Excel every day to write and keep track of the events in Junkcraft Armada, but after a few dozens I found that it was really difficult to keep track of the content and sync up it all together, adding new conditions was always a pain and had to edit so many XML nodes when I had to add something new, so I spent a lot more time on XML fixing in excel than actually creating content, so I decided that it is time now to change that and take a step to the next level. I searched for many months before for tools to simplify the work but I couldn't really find anything that could be incorporated into another game and still be open enough to handle all my requirements, and I am pretty much sure most developers face this same issue. So my solution is a very generic XML content creator that can hold many things but processed as needed with any variable needed.

Just to show up a little bit of what I am talking about, here is a screenshot of an event managed in excel, I had quite many variables and many are not even needed for all events, having to copy paste around 80 lines in excel per event made it very difficult to find and edit an event.

Not very nice... after 10 events in excel I had 800 lines! and it became unmanageable to keep adding variables and states with so many hundreds of lines!, so I ended up writing this little tool and it made my life super easy after.

In 4 days I got this working, only the exporter is still pending for XNA and the content manager in-game, but I think a day at most will suffice to finish this, but the most important part is that is so generic that it can be used for any other game that I have in mind, it can manage states and dialog trees in many ways and since all the variables can be linked with the local variables in game it means I don't have to re-invent the wheel to handle all this conditions, and if I ever found that I need super complicated condition, I can simply abstract all of that into the game itself and set a flag to true or false at the end for this event handler to handle, so it simplifies all the work in excel and state management in one small tool.

There will be consequences to many of the decisions the player makes and this little tool allows me now to do that job without having to keep track of everything in hundreds of cells in excel.

For example,  I can use a random number generator for the possible outcomes after the player selects what he/she wants to do in (1) below.

And then reuse the random variable for the different outcomes like in (2) below.

and having a visual representation of complex dialog trees helps speed up the content building while having access to many different variables exposed to the editor allows me to show/hide possible outcomes in-game instead of having to include all the variables in so many cells in excel, since I was using XML as a base in a spreadsheet I had to have the same structure for all the events so if I had to add one more variable in the past it meant that I had to add it to all the other events and it made my life so hard... but now is a different story.

If there is enough interest in this little tool I may release it as open source.

Lights and fire

The new light model inside ships is working now and I am now working on fire inside ships. Fire spreads quickly if no action taken and it can damage equipment and even destroy modules, you will have to direct your crew to extinguish fires, fight pirates and other tasks.

 

A couple of minutes later in another ship, a small fire was ignored and this is what it came to be...

Doors can holds against fire but not forever...