I started a new project yesterday that I’m really excited about! Basically it’s Rune Factory (Harvest Moon with some dungeon crawling) + some elements from rougelikes (Mainly randomly generated dungeons).
I spent all day yesterday coding the day/night cycle + seasons (It’s integral to pretty much everything in a Harvest Moon game) and it was so much fun! Currently I’m coding the farming system and I’m almost done with it, haven’t hit a major speed bump yet which is great!
Here is a video clip demonstrating what’s done so far here
And yes the sprites/tiles are stolen from Harvest Moon for the time being, don’t worry they are only placeholder 
New tower update, I’m too tired to write anything:
play it here
same controls as before except you can build blocks by pressing ‘X’
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!
Move — Arrow keys
Shift — Focus Movement
Z — Fire
DEBUG KEYS:
Change Power Level — 1–5
Restart Level — R
I have finally implemented the grazing and combo system, a lot easier then expected
If you hold shift now, in addition of focusing your movement and seeing your hitbox, you now also see you’re graze hitbox. Bullets passing through the graze circle gives you X points (exact number to be decided later) and the ship will drag in items touching the circle, making pickups easier.
The combo system allows you to chain in lots of kills for bonus points, for each enemy you kill the combo countdown resets to 1.5 seconds, so keep killing enemies to keep the combo going! At the moment the scoring works like this: X + (combo*3) where X is the point value for the enemy (In this case 100). So if you have a 75 combo (Which is going to be pretty hard to get once the stage layout and the enemy placement is finalized) and kill an enemy you will get 225 extra points for him, I’m probably going to change this number a lot when I start tweaking the mechanics later.
That’s everything for this update, I’m probably going to start working on the rest of the power levels and make some fancy shooting patterns for when you reach 4 and 5
Build 8 can be found here!
Move — Arrow keys
Shift — Focus Movement
Z — Fire
DEBUG KEYS:
Change Power Level — 1–5
Restart Level — R
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.
Move — Arrow keys
Shift — Focus Movement
Z — Fire
DEBUG KEYS:
Change Power Level — 1–5
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
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)
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
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
