(Note the colored dots all around the perimeter of the screen, indicating out-of-view enemies.)

It was kind of a pain to implement, I mean, in hindsight the math is pretty simple.  I originally thought I’d need trigonometry to solve it, but it turns out I didn’t even need it at all.  (Good ol’ reliable y = mx + b to the rescue.)

This weekend I gave the enemies some AI.  All they do is notice you’re (the player) in their area and they go into attack mode.  Attack mode consists of following you and shooting.  Later today I intend to make the AI slightly more robust and also work on tweaking the player’s movement via the accelerometer.  Right now it’s very annoying and I’ve been putting off fixing it.

I also did some other things including:

• Pooling all of the small mass-items (pickups, bullets, explosions).
• Having the player attract pickups in his vicinity as well as have him transform.
• The HUD bars accurately display the players XP and transformation progress (note the full blue bar, partially full purple bar, and the purple player in the screenshot above).
• Other things.

I would go on about this a bit more, but I have to run to class now.  In Paranoia 2 news, still moving ahead strong.  I’ll probably give a screenshot or two sometime this week, it’s coming along nicely.

How’s that for a logo?  I might end up adding some of the ships flying around in the background shooting at each other and such.

Anyway, I’m happy to report that everything I needed to do prior to this post was completed.  I can now have my ship fly around and shoot at the enemies, delivering damage and having them explode.  The destroyed enemies also drop little fruit pickups that the player can pick up to increase his XP (and points).  It’s not implemented just yet, but as the XP increases beyond certain levels, the player’s ship transforms and allows for more / stronger bullets to be fired (I’m actually going to be implementing this as soon as I’m done with this post).

So the to-do list for next Monday consists of:

• Implement player transformations based on XP.
• Pickups delete themselves when far enough away, they also attract themselves to the player when close enough.
• Pool bullets, pickups, and explosions (for performance, even though the game still runs at a solid 60fps as of now).
• Tweak movement, make it easier.  Also work on the “strafe” button and get that working.
• Implement “special ability” which makes the player temporarily much stronger and invincible (involves some animation and code tweaking).
• Add King Durian and have him function properly (the goal of each level is to destroy the Durians in the level).
• Get minimap working (may be more difficult then I think, but I’ll try to get it done in time).
• Work on enemy AI, get player health working, get score working, “pause” button – (probably will be done next week).

I think that’s good enough for this week’s to-do list.

In Paranoia 2 news, nothing new.  I haven’t worked on it much, I’m focusing more on the game right now.

A little less than 2 weeks and I’m officially done with my 3rd year of college (aka summer vacation).  What does that mean in terms of my productivity?  Hopefully good things…

As you can see from the above in-game screenshot, not only is the HUD practically finished (more on that in a second), but I also have bullets completely functional.  It was a bit of a pain hardcoding in all of the trigonometry for the creation points of each bullet for each ship type, it involved a lot of trial and error last night, but I’m very happy with the result.  Because I’m pooling the bullets, the game runs at a smooth 60fps with 700 ships and 3,000+ bullets flying around.

Other things I accomplished this past week was designing all of the font characters and getting text to function properly and efficiently in-game.  I also did a lot of tweaking to get sprite-batching working perfectly (in order to draw hundreds of objects with a single draw() call – both textured and non-textured).  I also just recently enabled touch input (to shoot) and have to soon enable the other two buttons on the screen – strafing and “pause”.

To Do:

By the time for the next game update post (Monday) I hope to have the following all good and done:

1. Bullets to respond to collisions with ships.
2. “Animation” for the ships (when they get shot at) and for certain bullets (that leave a trail).
3. Have enemies take damage and be able to be destroyed.
4. Individual enemy classes (right now all the code for every enemy is in one giant file with lot’s of switch statements).
5. Personalized fire-rates and aggression levels for each enemy.
6. Some performance tweaks and modifications.

I would also like to add the final element to the HUD, the “minimap” feature, but I don’t believe that’ll be on my immediate to-do list for a little while more.  It’s not going to be like a typical minimap and will instead show small indicators around the perimeter of the screen to show the location of enemies and objectives.  It seems like it will be simple enough to implement, I’m just hoping it won’t be too CPU-intensive.

Paranoia 2

Paranoia 2 is coming along nicely.  I tend to work on it a little each morning and because of the nature of this skit, much of the animation is already done.  I’m also screen-capturing every single time I work on it, so in the end I’ll also be uploading a “making of” video to Youtube, too.  (I’ll probably split it up into three or so parts since it might be a bit on the long side, even though the video itself is sped up.)

Alright, that’s it for this week.  Go away now.

Well, while this is an update, there’s not much to it though.  The past week or two have been pretty messy in terms of my daily routine / schedule – so not much is getting done in any department.  However, I have started buckling down and getting some work done in the development of Space Fruit.

Yes, Space Fruit.  If Paul hadn’t fallen off the face of the Earth (again) I’d expect a witty retort from him as the number one comment to this game title.

As you can see from the screenshot, however, the name is justifiable.  It is a game set in space, and there are what appear to be fruits flying around – thus, Space Fruit.

Right now I have all of the ships, bullets, and backgrounds drawn up and ready to go.  I’m now stuck in a period of advancing steps in development and then falling back three of four.  It sucks and really slows things down, but its necessary to change / scrap things when they become either too much of a pain to implement / control or if they’re just plain not fun.

I’m taking a break from the programming and designing the HUD elements in Photoshop (what you see in the screenshot).  I’m liking the layout and design so far, and with a bit more tweaking I’ll be ready to start implementing it tomorrow.

I expect things to continue to move along slowly for a little while longer as I continue to grasp the basics of not only a different programming language, but of a different gaming platform.  Oh, and not to mention OpenGL.

In other news, I’m beginning work on the second episode of Paranoia.  Cool, huh?

In other news…

So what have I been doing these past two weeks?  Nothing terribly exciting.  I have a really good grasp on programming games for Android using Eclipse/Java and Open GL ES 1.1.

As a result, I’ve been laying down the basic foundation for my first mobile game, which as of right now I intend to be a multi-directional space shooter, somewhat like Defective.  The main differences being the art-style, which will heavily resemble older 8-bit games, as well as the actual gameplay, which will be much simpler and share many elements with arcade games like Galaga and Bosconian.

Right now I’m doing a lot of stress-testing and tweaking to get things to perform perfectly.  The art you see in the screenshot is temporary, and I only drew it up just to get away from all the placeholder squares I had moving around.  How similar the final game art will be to this art is still unknown.

Right now however, things look very promising.  On a mobile device, I have 1,000 alpha’d objects flying around, rotating and everything, at a solid 50+ fps – this with no optimizations at all (aka batching).  I’m really starting to love OpenGL – it makes me want to give Stage3D another chance now that I have a basic idea of how GPU-based programming works.

But that’s right, Defective is finally out in the wild.  Go play it and tell me what you think.

A big thanks to Andy over at ShootingGamesFree.org for sponsoring the game.  Defective will be exclusively hosted on his game site for the next few days before it’s available on sites like Newgrounds / Kongregate.

As most of you know, I started Defective back in May 2011 where it was a completely different-looking game for a quite a while (I even uploaded a few videos of me drawing the characters, here’s one of them).  Then, after I had my spine ripped out, I completely scrapped it, started anew, and finished the project somewhere around September 2011.  Here are a few of the selling points:

• 12 levels of shoot-em-up action… in space!
• 3 intense boss fights.
• 5 beautiful, custom-made music tracks just for this game!
• Storyline with a beginning and ending cutscene.
• 5 different upgrade types to find, 2 in each level.
• 5 different enemy types, not including 4 smaller “minion” enemies and 2 “turret” enemies.
• The player can transform into any of the main enemy types after destroying and absorbing 3 of their “souls.”
• Particles, particles everywhere.
• Achievements, who doesn’t like achievements?
• Save / load functionality with 2 separate “save slots,” players can pick up from where they left off later!
• Beautiful and polished graphics.

Speaking of selling points, another shout-out to Dave Fleming for scoring all of the music in Defective.

Alright, that’s it, go play the game already.

Defective

Defective has been sponsored.  Expect it to be released any day now (I’ll of course announce it all over this site as well as on my Twitter page) – all I’m waiting on is the sponsor to send me the assets to brand the game with.  I can’t wait to finally get this game done with and released, it’s going to do great!

Animation

The untitled animation I’ve been working on in my spare time over the past week or two is practically finished.  All that’s left is for me to draw the background for the final scene and add sounds / music.

It’ll be released on both NewGrounds and Youtube sometime later this week.

Android Stuff

I could probably finish that animation today (I worked all day on it yesterday) but I’m probably going to leave it be for at least a day or two.  This is mainly because I want to get back to focusing on my Beginning Android Games book and start getting a grasp on Open GL ES.  It’s a pretty hairy topic from what I understand, but to make the games I want to make, it’s necessary to understand Open GL ES and its advantage over typical CPU-powered graphics.

Anyway, so those are my plans for the next few days – Android stuff, animation completion / release, and Defective release!

Anyway, the funny thing is, this past week was the exception to the rule.  I got a lot of work done over the course of the week, but once the weekend came, I just couldn’t get myself into gear (plus I felt pretty crappy for whatever reason).

But first, a quick note about Defective – the Quick Auction I activated on FlashGameLicense has 8 days left, so in about a week expect a definite release date (it’s funny how it’s almost been one whole year since I started that game).

Alright, into the good stuff.

Accomplished:

• Animated all of the Player’s sprites.
• Added functionality for the “special attack” button.
• Added more functionality to the buttons on the HUD, all are pressable and work.  The added meter next to the “Special Attack” button accurate shows the recharge progress.

Now, this upcoming week is going to be a little odd, for a few reasons.  I may not get any work done (in fact, I may go backwards in terms of progress) but I feel it’s for the best in the long-term.  Here’s why:

Learning About Native Android Development

I’ve always wanted to program a game in Java and since native Android development using the Android SDK is all done in Java, I figure this would be the best time to start.  It’s not like it will be difficult to learn (it’s practically identical to AS3), but it will take some getting used to.  Plus, from what I understand, this will give me greater control over my apps plus better performance when it comes to more intense graphic usage.

As a result, I’m going to put everything on hold and start focusing all of my efforts into learning this stuff.  Once I feel I’m ready, I’m going to port Kill the Bad Things over to Java and resume progress.

Animation in the Works

I’ve been working on a small animation that I plan to be nearly finished with by the end of this week.  It’s short – a little over a minute in its completion, and it’s all frame-by-frame animation.  It’s going to be episode one of a little series I have planned – all short skits.  I already have the perfect ideas for episodes two and three.  More news on this next week, though.

A New Project

The main reason I made the transition to developing Android games was to jump into a new niche and create a few games for younger children (eg – no words, very simple).  Why?  Well, I feel this could be somewhat profitable if I can create decent-enough games, and this incoming cash-flow will help me to work on my other, bigger projects (such as Kill the Bad Things and my other browser-based Flash games).

This weekend, I finally came up with a solid idea for my first toddler-game, and since it’s so simple, it would normally take me approximately a week or two to finish.  However, I feel this would be the perfect opportunity to learn native Android development (in Java), so I’m going to put everything on hold while I simultaneously develop this game and learn the ins-and-outs of developing games using the Android SDK.

This week, things went very smoothly, though due to other things getting in the way (college), it seems that weekdays are incredibly unproductive for me.  The majority of the work that got done this week was done yesterday (Saturday) and I’m confident that another burst of updates will be done today (most of which you probably won’t hear about until next week’s “Weekly Game Update” post).

Alright enough nonsense, here’s a screenshot of how the game looks so far.

I’m extremely happy with how the game looks when it’s being played on an actual device (the enlarged screenshot doesn’t do it justice).  The colors are much more vivid and the graphics are very sharp and detailed.  Oh, and if you happen to recognize the design of the player in that screenshot (which I’m sure 100% of you don’t) I actually re-made one of the characters from an old scrapped project of mine, seen here.

Accomplished:

• Set up basic foundation of the game / levels – optimized blitting to simulate scrolling and free up memory only to find that it actually slowed the game down and had no effect on memory, scrapped it.
• Programmed a functional directional-pad set up on the screen.
• Player moves around the screen with the directional-pad.
• Designed temporary HUD elements, eventually got around to designing a better looking HUD (what is seen in the screenshot is very similar to what the final product will look like).
• Developed a bitmap-font system to display text on the screen using a font sprite-sheet and blitting.
• Programmed the timer in the HUD.
• Designed temporary background tiles (grass).
• Designed the main character in one of his standing positions.

To-do:

• Animate the player in his standing / running sprites for all four directions (technically three, as right / left will be mirrored) – also possibly the melee attack animation for all four (three) directions.
• Develop the Player (and generally the Character) classes more – adjustable acceleration, speed, sprites, etc…
• Develop the HUD further with the remaining three buttons functional (or at least press-able) – “Pause / Weapons,” “Melee Attack,” and “Weapon Attack.”
• Splash / loading screens – how do they work?

And that’s about it for everything about that game.

Now, about Defective.  On Monday I will activate Quick Auction on FlashGameLicense, which from my understanding is a quick auction (no way).  If I don’t get any bids I feel happy about, I will be self-sponsoring the game and releasing it some time next week (the week beginning March 4th).  Expect news on that next weekend.

For my eagle-eyed readers, you may have noticed the title of the game.  Kill the Bad Things not only made me chuckle the first time I thought of it, it also describes the game perfectly.

Release Date?

Since this isn’t an online Flash game, I won’t have to go through the sponsorship process, so the time from completion to launch will be nearly instant.  On top of that, this game won’t be anywhere near as big or complex as my previous games, so development time will be much shorter as well.

I originally came up with this idea to submit for my free Blackberry Playbook, but it seems I missed out because I didn’t sign up in time.  Regardless, I still estimate this will only take me roughly two weeks to complete.  (Place your bets, am I going to regret saying that or not?)

Alright, I’m going to get back to work now.