(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.

Just a quick post to tell you that the animation I’ve been working on and off of for the past two weeks is done.  I really gave it my all in terms of the animation and backgrounds and I’m really proud of the outcome.  Even the NewGrounds reveiws seem to enjoy it, as they’re all positive feedback (which is rare, lolol).

You can also go view it on the actual Youtube page if you’re so inclined, or even on NewGrounds (vote 5 please – it helps).

Like I’ve said before, I already have the ideas for the next three episodes, and since they’re all going to be short skits like this (about a minute long) there’s no reason I won’t be able to do it.  I plan on beginning episode two over the weekend.

Alright, back to doing other stuff.

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!

Animation released!

Well, not one of my animations, but still.  My friend-with-benefits, Brandon, finally got around to finishing his second Flash animation after a year of me yelling at him to stop procrastinating (or something like that).

It’s a tribute to some small game titled “Alan Wake” or something and is available for your viewing pleasure on both NewGrounds and Youtube.  Go check it out and rate 5 / thumb it up, it’s definitely NewGrounds front-page material and I expect to see it there in the coming days.

Edit – It’s already front-paged, very nice!

Defective coming soon!

Bidding on Defective ends today, and as of right now it looks like I have a sponsor.  What does that mean?  That means expect to play that damn game any day now – it just now depends on when the sponsor wants to release it!

My animation update.

As some of you know from last week’s post, I’ve been working on a small skit animation in my free time.  As of right now, I’d say it’s somewhere around 70% done, but the toughest part lies directly ahead of me (animation-wise).  Here’s a screenshot to give you an idea of what it looks like.

I already have a tentative title for the series (again, all small 1 – 2 minute episodes) and have ideas for episodes 2, 3, and 4.  Expect more updates (and possibly even a release) later this week!

What about some game updates?

There was no Weekly Game Update post this week mainly because there are no real “active” projects being worked on.  I’m currently learning the ins-and-outs of Java, the Eclipse IDE, and programming with the Android SDK.

I have to give a tip of my hat to Mario Zechner, the author of the book I purchased, “Beginning Android Games.”  It’s a really well-written book with clear and concise topics and examples covering nearly every aspect of developing native (Java) games for Android.

Honestly, before this book arrived in the mail, I obviously tried to go about figuring all of this stuff online.  Take it from me, it’s just not the same and is definitely not as comprehensive as having everything laid out on paper right in front of you.  I highly recommend his book to anyone getting started with Android (though not necessarily anyone just getting started with game development / Java in general, as the book does require you to understand certain things in order to build from it).

And that’s about it.  This is my final week of classes before Spring break next week, so once this week is over I intend on doing nothing but watching TV getting some major work done.  So once again, go check out Brandon’s animation on NewGrounds and / or Youtube and give him some props.

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.