I decided to try mak­ing a word­press themes, and it was sim­pler than I thought! I wanted some­thing really sim­ple like this theme, but couldn’t find any­thing sim­i­lar, so I decided to make it myself

So I started on yet another project (I had a cou­ple of oth­ers which I haven’t posted, but they turned out pretty bad and didn’t get past the pro­to­typ­ing stage), but this is a project I should be able to fin­ish at least due to it’s sim­plic­ity. It’s a clas­sic endurance game where you jump up a tower while try­ing to get as far as pos­si­ble, since all the lev­els are pro­ce­du­rally gen­er­ated I don’t need to do any level design (which is what killed my drive while work­ing on the shmup)  which means I can eas­ily add some­thing and just add it into the gen­er­a­tor and it plops the powerup/obstacle into the map when it wants to, sav­ing me a lot of trouble!

I’m hav­ing lots of fun mak­ing this one, cod­ing is pretty straight­for­ward and fun (at the moment atleast) sprit­ing is a lot of fun and I’m even enjoy­ing playtest­ing the game (Even though it’s very bare­bones right now )

Things to add on top of my head include:

• HUD (score dis­play, time etc)
• Obsta­cles (blocks that break if you stand on them for more than 1 sec­ond, wall tur­rets that stun)
• Level fea­tures (ran­domly gen­er­ate rooms and stuff like that)

So I got off my lazy ass and actu­ally did some new shoot­ing pat­terns, inspired by one of the pat­terns from DoDon­Pachi. I had to do A LOT of tweak­ing to get that nice “wavy” feel­ing to it, but I’m really happy with the results

Dif­fer­ence between unfo­cused and focused

I made the focus but­ton also focus the fire, so when you hold shift the cone of fire gets smaller which make it more effec­tive against sin­gle foes (This is borrowed/stolen from Touhou), oh and speak­ing of new fea­tures if you go to the top of the screen all pick­ups will auto­mat­i­cally be dragged toyou as if they are inside the graze cir­cle (This is ALSO from Touhou). I’m start­ing to feel that all the core mechan­ics are in place and I’m going to start work­ing on new ene­mies next; and to test out the ene­mies I’m going to make a sim­ple sur­vival mode where you meet ene­mies in a ran­dom order until you die.

Build 9 can be found here!

So it was kinda annoy­ing not hav­ing a name for the project, so I came up with a pre­lim­i­nary (maybe final) name and logo:

And after that I decided to actu­ally do some work on the game, I decided to do the inter­face before adding the scor­ing sys­tem since the inter­face con­sisted of a gray box on the right side of the screen.

I made the Inter­face a nice yel­low, I added in a Score and High Score counter (doesn’t actu­ally save your High Score at the moment), Made a Power counter/bar, for every 25 power your weapons get bet­ter. (0 is level 1, 25 is level 2 and 100 is level 5 (MAX)) It only goes up to 2 at the moment so it doesn’t change when you get to level 3 and beyond.

To test the score/power counter I added some scor­ing and power up items. Every enemy drops either a P(ower) item which increases your power by 2 or they drop a S(core) item which increases your score by 25. For every enemy you kill you get 100 points. This scor­ing sys­tem is in it’s really early stages since I haven’t imple­mented graz­ing or the combo sys­tem (Which I’m doing next)

Lastly I made some new sound effects to replace old ones and also for grab­bing the power ups. Before I used some NES sound effects, but then I found DrPetter’s sfxr, which is a really awe­some tool which ran­domly gen­er­ates sound effects based on what you want.

Build 7 can be found here.

So I was hav­ing a LAN party the last cou­ple of days, so I took a break from cod­ing. I will start cod­ing again start­ing Mon­day. I’m try­ing to visu­al­ize how scor­ing will work, I’m think­ing of steal­ing the combo sys­tem from DoDon­Pachi and the Graze sys­tem from Touhou.

DoDonPachi’s combo sys­tem give you extra points for every enemy you kill within a cer­tain time frame from killing the last, so if you kill 10 ene­mies within 10 sec­onds you get a 10 combo, the higher the combo is the higher the point bonus is for every enemy.

Touhou’s  graze sys­tem is a mechanic that award you extra points for being a dare­devil and graz­ing enemy bul­lets with­out touch­ing them directly.

I’m not sure about the specifics, I don’t want to give too much point bonus for the combo sys­tem because then it will be all about keep­ing up your chain for the entire level which I don’t think should be a require­ment to get a decent score, and I’m not sure at all about graz­ing, I’ll exper­i­ment with it when I start work­ing on the game again.