I swear I’m still around, honest

Haven’t had much time to work on anything recently. My day job sent me off to Arizona for a week, which was admittedly pretty cool, but not really related to this blog. So, moving on!

Been playing Homeworld Remastered. It’s still really janky, such is the problem with porting Homeworld 1 into an updated Homeworld 2 engine, but it’s still Homeworld and it’s still fun and it’s still evoking the same feelings the original game did for me. Also nice is the ability to make custom emblems…which of course means its time to put emblems from other sci-fi properties into it…

Yes, I am still a huge nerd. And while it’s still broken in a lot of respects, Gearbox and the modding community are doing a lot to fix it, so I think in time it’ll be great again. Plus the game looks gorgeous.

On the art front I’ve been doing more enemy designs, specifically making some enemy fighters that look more like modified mining craft:

In this case, the cannons on the front were originally drills. I’m still working on more designs but this week I’m also getting more into the actual tech of the game. More to come later.

Saturday Midnight’s All Right for Updates : Ablation Dev Blog #2

I’m going to be mostly away from my main work station this weekend since I’m visiting my parents, but I have gotten quite a bit done this week. The level now scrolls, I have enemies in place (right now they respawn if they leave the bottom of the screen without dying, I may change that), and the player can shoot them and collect upgrades. I don’t have all the upgrades fully finished yet, but I’m working towards it. Screenshots and Videos after the jump:

Ablative Starfighter: 2010 WPI D-Term Game Jam Game

In roughly 48 hours, Graham Pentheny and I created a working version of Ablative Starfighter, the space shooter game I’ve been trying to prototype for a while now. Graham did all of the coding while I did the art and sound, as well as coming up with the core concept.

The theme for this Game Jam was the Seven Deadly Sins, and I felt that my ideas for Ablative Starfighter could suit both Greed and Gluttony quite well.

Made in Flixel, this version of Ablative Starfighter is a bit different from the envisioned format of a veritcal shooter, instead being in the style of geometry wars. But the principle I feel applies to any sort of shooter. Basically your ship can upgrade itself to fight enemies, but with every upgrade it acquires, the ship becomes slower both in speed and maneuvering. Essentially this is where the greed and the gluttony come in, since you can weigh yourself down with upgrades and damage tank, but you’ll be more susceptible to actually getting hit. However, it’s a two-way street. You can purge upgrades as your bomb-type weapon, freeing yourself up at the cost of armor or weaponry. For this version we stuck with 6 upgrades, alternating a weapon and armor upgrade for each tier, and limited the number of enemies you face before taking on our boss, Munch of 38 Studios (they were one of the sponsors of the Game Jam). You can play the game at Graham’s WPI-hosted webspace here. It’s more in a demonstration phase since you only fight a small number of enemies before the boss and then the game ends (the boss also having an insane number of hitpoints). At some point Graham and I will probably turn it into a more full-fledged experience with more enemy types and so forth.