March 5

11:51

Long time no update

I haven’t updated in a while, because not much have hap­pened (related to my cod­ing any­way) I have been busy with doing some free­lance web design and play­ing games.

I also got bored with cod­ing Sol.. as usual :( so I’m gonna take a break for a while and next time I start mak­ing a game I will keep it sim­ple and actu­ally get it fin­ished (prob­a­bly going to be a puz­zle game or some­thing) before I get back to the shmup. I’m prob­a­bly going to take a break until the next Some­thing Awful Game Dev com­pe­ti­tion because I’ve been fol­low­ing the ear­lier ones and it sounds like fun!

January 24

01:37

Cool shooting patterns and stealing more ideas from Touhou

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

January 19

10:58

Grazing & Combo system

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

January 18

09:26

New interface! New name!

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

January 17

03:00

No coding done, lazy

Just updat­ing to say that I’m still alive. I haven’t done any cod­ing this past week, I’ve been busy play­ing vidya games (wrap­ping up Per­sona 3 mostly)

I’m prob­a­bly PROBABLY going to start cod­ing some on mon­day, get that score sys­tem up and run­ning :)

January 9

17:40

This blog isn’t dead I swear

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.

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