Alright, well, that was a fast week. Jeez, time flew right by. Anyway, I’ve got a lot of stuff to do today, so let’s jump right in shall we?
Stats:
Alrighty, well, the game is finally titled! After a long period of not having a clue for a name, it just hit me one day. I’ve already made a post about it (and I also have it in the header area) – but in case you still haven’t heard, the title will be “Don’t Panic.” That may make the game sound all serious and whatnot, but I assure you that’s not the case, if anything the game will make you laugh once or twice during the cutscenes.
According to my header up there, the game was 39% complete as of this time last week and currently stands at 45%. That is a 6% improvement in just 1 week. Not nearly as good as the 19% improvement from last week, but I’ll take what I can get.
I admit that Minecraft took up at least 3 or 4 days of development progress away from me at the beginning of the week, but I’m over it now. I made a post about it earlier, so check it out if you want to see more on the topic.
Accomplished:
What I’ll do here is take the “To-Do” list from the previous week and amend whether I did or didn’t complete the task. I’ll also add to the end of the list any tasks I completed that I didn’t have listed.
- Animate more variations of explosions. Some small explosions, some bigger ones, and some unique-looking ones. Shouldn’t be too hard but it will be very tedious work. I finally get to use my tablet, though. (Completed, it was very tedious work, but I did it.)
- Program and design flying enemies. FLYING ENEMIES! (Half completed. I designed one flying enemy after scrapping the design at first and starting over, I didn’t do any programming though.)
- Give bullets some polish (trails, impact animations, etc). (Not completed.)
- Begin programming the player’s reinforcement AI to do their particular job. (Not completed.)
- Start designing the player, the player’s reinforcements, and the player’s weapons. (Half completed. I designed both the player and his reinforcements, but not in their top-down form, which is the form you’ll see them in 99% of the game.)
- And above all – come up with a title! (Completed.)
- Created the game title art. You can check it out in the sidebar under “Recent Game Dev Pics.”
- Enabled functionality for player to use scroll wheel to scroll between weapons.
To-Do:
- Program the flying enemy as well as design and program one more type of flying enemy.
- Give bullets some polish (trails, impact animations, etc).
- Begin programming the player’s reinforcement AI to do their particular job.
- Draw and animate the player and his reinforcements in their top-down form.
- Start the menu design (simple 3D-programming involved).
Planning Ahead:
All of these are currently carried over from last week, nothing new to add at the moment.
- The opening and ending cutscenes have to be planned out. This can’t be accomplished until I know what the player and his team will look like. (How difficult or easy it will be to animate them.)
- Design and program the opening and in-between menus including the “buy” menu, “upgrade” menu, etc. Also implement robust saving and loading functionality. This can’t be accomplished until the game is further along in development.
- Begin adding new levels as well as program each level’s enemy-spawning algorithm. This can’t be completed until all enemies have been created and bug tested.
- A half-way boss battle and a final boss battle. This can’t be completed because it’s going to be a pain in the ass to program since I want it done right. Not a very good reason but too bad.
Alright, that’s the review of the game dev work for the past week. Not a lot done, but like I said blame is on Minecraft! Next week will be different for sure. Also, this is my last week until I return to college on January 24th – once that happens I’m sure my productivity will be slightly affected, but hopefully not too much.
It’s worth mentioning that I do have a new project on my plate as well – “Hero Dude” has returned and is currently in the planning stages. I explained more of it in this post, so go read about it there.
Well, that’s it for this week, until next time!
(PS – Sorry for the lack of screenshots, like I said in my last Weekly Game Update post, don’t expect screenshots every week because sometimes it’s just not warranted. I will have a post in a day or two outlining the development process of the character designs, however, so that’ll be nice.)