At least Sisyphus didn’t have to call Tech Support

So right after I talked about appreciating the small victories, I got handed a not-so-small defeat. My motherboard ended up burning out, thus cementing my dislike of MSI motherboards, and further cementing my dislike of Intel’s factory-provided CPU cooling fan/heat sink combo. Some time (and money) later, I now have my computer back online with a new motherboard (Asus) and a liquid coolant setup so I don’t have to deal with that fan nonsense again.

Since then I haven’t been doing as much as i’d like, though I did create another entry in my “Roguelike’s Gallery” video series, talking about Teleglitch, which you can see here (part one of three).

And I am, still, slowly, working on Ablation, having now added a few enemies and finally fixed the player movement. Here have a .gif of progress.

It does run a bit fast but oh well, you can see the gist. I’m currently trying to get the upgrade system in place and then have a first level ready to go. I wish I was a lot more dilligent on this kind of stuff but I’m getting back into the groove.

So, I made a Starbound mod

I used to play a lot of Starbound when it first hit Steam. I had a few friends who were into it and we spent a lot of time exploring the stars despite the game’s jankiness. Frequent update wipes did put a damper on things for a while, but recently some of those same friends of mine got me back into it. They also suggested, as a way of dealing with my occasional bouts of developer’s block, to create a mod for it. Initially I was opposed because I wasn’t sure what to mod for it, but I eventually relented and started working. Being able to work in 2D again was a welcome change from all my more 3d-centric stuff recently, and within a month I created a mod that I just today put up on the Starbound community for anyone to download.

It’s a mod pack of WW2-era firearms, which intially was just going to be a Tommy Gun mod but my friends convinced me to go a bit farther and I’m glad they did. I had a lot of fun making the mod and I hope people enjoy it. There’s 5 guns in the pack, a Tommy Gun, an StG 44, a Sten, a Mosin-Nagant, and a Colt 1911 pistol. They’re weapons by and large for the Beta sector of space, and hopefully are balanced appropriately. If you want to check it out as well as see more screenshots, click the link here

2013 In Review

I’ll have some more information about Shuffle Breaker in a bit, for now though here is a YouTube video compiling my work over 2013 into a bit of a portfolio piece.

Also I’ll be attending Global Game Jam 2014 this year cause I got lucky with the way my work schedule sorted out for that week. Should be fun!

April in Review: MBD Dev Blog #2

So yesterday I finished and submitted my game for the Ludum Dare 26 jam. MBD, short for Mondrian Base Defense is a minimalist tower defense game. Very simplistic, in that you only have two tower types (Laser and Cannon) and three enemy types. Graphics are also pretty simple too as you’ll soon see below. I went with the Commodore 64 color palette this time around because why the heck not.

I had a lot of fun doing this, took me only about 48 hours (not nonstop mind you), and I learned quite a bit in the process. Like how to create individual health bars for multiple objects. Also how to use paths in Game Maker Studio. As for Invaders of the Stratosphere I do have a plan to revive the game as a Defender clone but I need to figure out how to accomplish the sort of screen-warping Defender does in Game Maker.

Download the game here. Screenshots for MBD follow below:

Sudden Subject Change: IOTS Dev Blog #3 and MBD Dev Blog #1

So I’m really bad at staying on topic. Namely because I’ve put Invaders of the Stratosphere on hold when it’s probably like 90% feature-complete. This was a decision brought on by Ludum Dare 26, of which I’m participating in the Jam portion of it. The theme was minimalism, I’d always wanted to try tower defense, and well, things snowballed from there.

Anyway here’s a shot of Invaders as it is now:

At least I got the shielded enemies working.

And now here’s a shot of MBD, “Minimalist Base Defense”. The large empty green space is reserved for the interface.

Choosy devs choose GIF: Invaders of the Stratosphere dev blog #2

No screenshots at this point in time mostly due to other life stuff and writing code. But I do have a few animated gifs. First is the second basic enemy UFO:

And here’s the Level 1 boss who is pretty much a Big Core from Gradius:

Hopefully I’ll have more stuff up later in the week.

I am bad at postmortems: Invaders of the Stratosphere Dev Blog #1

So this month has been quite rough, game-dev wise. Initially I had plans of making a parody of Mega Man wherin you played a tax-collecting robot called Tax Man (yes you see what I did there) but it wasn’t really clicking. Apart from the “lol Libertarians” aspect I didn’t really have a lot going for the idea so I scrapped it; maybe I’ll go back to it next year. I initially thought about going back to Suburban Assault Riders but I wasn’t quite feeling like returning to it either, so instead I decided to just do a horizontal shooter, based on an idea I had back in 2007 or thereabouts. Incidentially this is what I’ve really liked about One Game a Month, in that it allows me to revist ideas that I had in college but didn’t have the time or know-how to work on.

Invaders of the Stratosphere is a horizontal shooter based on 1950s b-movies about alien invasions (and also War of the Worlds). The player controls an F-86 Sabre fighter jet as they fight invading enemy forces across the planet. Most enemies will look like stereotypical UFOs but there will also be enemies resembling more famous alien vehicles such as the “manta ray”-shaped alien craft from the 1950s War of the Worlds movie. Right now I only have the following screenshot but expect to see more as I progress.

Flying over the city

Small Miracles: Ablation Dev Blog #6

Despite Internet issues this weekend, I finally managed to finish the Beta of Ablation and submit it to One Game a Month, where it now sits on my profile page here. You can download it either from that link or the direct dropbox link here. I’m hoping later this year to come back to it and finish it up. I’ll have a postmortem post up within the next couple days as well as possibly some more video footage, but for now enjoy the 3 level beta and these images a friend made up for the Gold Jackal and Blue Bobcat on the ship select screen:

Gold Jackal

Blue Bobcat

Halfway Point: Ablation Dev Blog #4

Level 1 is all but completed now, as well as the score and other HUD elements:

Fully-powered

Granted I’m still working on some elements (for example, no upgrade level indicator nor is there a lives indicator) but the rest of the essentials are there. This next week I plan to spend on the next level as well as cleaning up some stuff in the back end.

Racking up Points: Ablation Dev Blog #3

So today I finally slapped some more enemies into the mix as well as added health and score systems. You can check out the results of that here on YouTube.

Granted there are some problems. The score and high score aren’t aligned vertically, it’s still a bit too easy to die, and the level boss shows up after 10 seconds (although that was a test of the timer). I’m feeling really good about where I am at this point of the month though, with 1/3 of it down I have almost all the framework in place to just bulldoze on ahead and make my game.