Game3 W?/4

I’m working on the next game, although I gave myself an extended period of rest. After failing to complete the last one I needed to distract myself a bit from this activity, so I worked a bit on Fennel stuff, played some games, and I think I’m back in business by now. I have an interesting thing going on with my productivity - it comes in waves. What I mean is that I can go onto programming frenzy for several months, and then once I feel burned out, I can just play games for another full month straight. Though I get tired of games too, and if by that time I feel that I’m not ready for programming yet, I can read some technical books, or even just some manga if I still feel too tired to be productive.

So this five month marathon is a bit hard for me, as I basically have to give up on long periods of rest, and juggle my free time to actually have some time to work on these projects. While these games are nothing special, I feel like I’m still learning new stuff, and thus this is beneficial for me still. Though, at some I actually thought of dropping the whole idea, and starting a more complex project that I was thinking about for a lot of time already. But I decided to leave it for the next year, as I still need a lot to learn. But, back on the topic.

This post actually marks the end of only the second week of the current game. How come, you might ask? To put it simply, I miscalculated a bit, and in reality I had another week on the previous game by the time I dropped it. So, technically, I could probably finish that game, but the burnout got me, so that’s that.

As for this game, I have a little to show. As it is a side-scrolling shooter, I designed a basic ship with some shooting modules, and some powerup icons. I considered to not making any graphics for this one, and doing everything with just primitives, like triangles, circles and so on, but after trying to draw a ship like this I dropped the idea and returned to Pixel Studio. Here are the results so far:

The ship turned out to be a bit too big, but I decided that I can make a game with larger assets for a change. So the enemy also uses 4 sprites, instead of just one, as in my previous games.

And here are the enemies animated:

Obviously, I need to add more enemy variety, with different patterns, but designing enemies is hard. BTW, if you’re curious how I draw things on the phone, here’s a time-lapse:

Though, I usually don’t do it in the landscape mode, portrait mode works better for me, especially with a stylus. This process was recorded in landscape just for viewing convenience.

On the technical side of things, I already implemented a basic movement with linear interpolation for the flying modules, and implemented some enemy patterns, but there’s no actual interactions yet. I’m kinda torn on the idea of including bump.lua again, as I feel like that this game can be done without any collision library. At the same time, having a collision library may make things much simpler, so I’m still thinking how to approach this game.

For the record, I basically dropped the idea of making any kind of music for these games because I just can’t get myself to work on it. I do plan to take some courses on music composition for future projects, though. Sound effects are challenging enough already by themselves.

That’s all for this week! Hopefully, I’ll manage to finish the game this time, though I already lost one week. Let’s say, this is week 1/3 instead of 2/4 shall we? Feels less demotivating this way.