January 5

03:24

Sound

I added some sound, mainly sounds from the NES chip. The game is much more lively now :) Now the only thing I need is some music. I down­loaded a tracker and every­thing but then I remem­bered that I have zero musi­cal tal­ent, so I gave up pretty fast. I’m cur­rently try­ing to find some good pub­lic domain/fair use chip­tunes which I think would make the game 100x more awe­some! :)

Lat­est ver­sion here!

Move — Arrow keys
Shift — Focus Movement
Z — Fire
DEBUG KEYS:
Power down — 1
Power up — 2

January 4

20:36

My god.. it’s full of stars.

Didn’t add any major fea­tures today, I mainly worked on the effect class which works kind of like my enemy class, except it han­dles explo­sions, emit­ters, stars and stuff like that.

I started work­ing on the back­ground, at the moment it’s just some stars that zoom by, I’m think­ing of mak­ing stage one half empty space and the other half inside a space sta­tion of some kind, we’ll see how that turns out.

Lat­est ver­sion can be found here.

Move — Arrow keys
Shift — Focus Movement
Z — Fire
DEBUG KEYS:
Power down — 1
Power up — 2
Spawn ene­mies — 3 (hold it down for hilar­i­ous results)

January 3

22:07

Enemies and explosions!

Today I pro­grammed the Enemy class. The Enemy class is shared by all ene­mies, when the game adds an enemy it also passes the type to the Enemy class and will change the sprite/movement/bullet pat­tern accord­ingly! This saves me a lot of has­sle hav­ing to recode it every time I want to add a new enemy type.

Boom

I did a quick job sprit­ing the first can­non fooder enemy, the Drone, not very happy with it so I’m going to go back and redo it first thing tomor­row. I also spr­ited my first explo­sion ever, I’ve always been afraid of sprit­ing explo­sions since they look so hard to do, but I man­aged to knock out some­thing decent! I spent much time cod­ing the emit­ters and get­ting the explo­sion to look right and I think it turned out pretty good! :)

Turned down the res­o­lu­tion to how it was at first, since twice the res­o­lu­tion was just too big and I don’t want to alien­ate peo­ple with shitty resolutions/monitors.

Lat­est ver­sion can be found here!

Con­trols:
Move — Arrow keys
Shift — Focus Movement
Z — Fire

January 2

22:31

Shmup update

Worked some more on the game today, spent some time pro­gram­ming the enemy bul­lets so I can change their direc­tion etc at will. Also added some ene­mies with no AI and place­holder sprite just to try out the bul­let code. Spent some time tweak­ing the hit boxes as well.

You can try the lat­est ver­sion here (con­trols are the same)

Edit:

Upped the res­o­lu­tion the bit (about twice as high), new HD ver­sion here

Shmup-2–20100102

January 1

21:42

New Project: Unnamed Shmup!

I’ve been play­ing lots of Touhou lately, and I thought it would be fun mak­ing my own Shmup! I’m going to borrow/steal some of the game­play mechan­ics from Touhou, like hold­ing shift to focus move­ment :)

Player ship

I have worked on it for a cou­ple of hours and I got the basics down: A player ship that can move and shoot. Noth­ing too chal­leng­ing yet; next is cod­ing some basic ene­mies to shoot. AI is a bit of my weak point but since it’s a Shmup it shouldn’t be too chal­leng­ing, the only thing I think I will have trou­ble with is cod­ing all the dif­fer­ent bul­let patterns.

Here is what I got so far, con­trols are Arrow keys to move, Shift to focus move­ment and Z to fire

14:37

My earlier Flixel projects

To start off I’m going to post and talk a lit­tle about two off  my Flixel projects, one aban­doned and one on-hold.

Dr. Dig Screenshot

Dr. Dig screenshot

My sec­ond Flixel game was Dr. Dig (place­holder name), which I started mak­ing when I real­ized that cod­ing a huge metroid­va­nia game was too big for my first game. It was sup­posed to be a flash ver­sion of the arcade game Mr. Driller, but I lost inter­est and had a hard time cod­ing the blocks so that they behave the way they do in Mr. Driller (Blocks of the same color adja­cent to each other become one big block) so I aban­doned it.

On the bright side I got some much needed cod­ing expe­ri­ence in Flixel from it and learned me some things, like using func­tions for recur­ring things like level generation.

You can try the last ver­sion here, You move using the arrow keys and X to dig.

Status Unknown screenshot

Sta­tus Unknown screenshot

My first Flixel game, Sta­tus Unknown, was going to be a huge metroid­va­nia game where you explore the depths of the moon, find­ing arti­facts and so on. The engine, and basic ground­work is there but I don’t think I’m capa­ble of doing it jus­tice right now, so it’s on indef­i­nite hold, I will prob­a­bly revisit this in a year or two and make it from scratch.

You can try the last ver­sion here, Arrow keys to move, Z to jump and hold V to show the mini map (which is obvi­ously inspired by Metroid)

And that’s all for this post. Later today or tomor­row I’m going to start work­ing on my new game, if all goes well I will post a lit­tle about it tomor­row :)

12:07

A new year and a new blog

It’s a new year, and my new years promise is to spend much more time cod­ing games to improve myself as an pro­gram­mer, artist and hope­fully sound designer/musician.

So far I’ve almost solely made games using Game Maker, it wasn’t until late last year I finally found out how fun it was cod­ing things from the ground up. I started using Flixel since it was pretty easy to get into, plus it’s flash which makes shar­ing my game that much eas­ier :)

Any­way I’m going to start updat­ing this log semi-regularly over this next year with ran­dom progress reports and pro­to­types. I’m also think­ing about sign­ing up for the next Ludum Dare, but I don’t know if I’m ready for that just yet :P