Andrey Listopadov

Game3 - Results

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 17:12:00 +0300

I gave myself 1 extra day on this game because in total I was only able to work on this game for 5 days, two of which were on the train. So this game is now done, although I couldn’t make any sounds for it. Designing explosion and blaster sounds that sound good is hard. The game isn’t really complete, and you get practically invincible once you get 3 power-ups. As wasn’t able to do much this time, so a lot of sprites are left unused. Anyhow, here’s the game:

Play Game3 - Shoot 'Em Up on itch.io

Since the last post, I changed a lot. First, bump is back and all collisions are handled through it again.

I made some more weapons, the default one has a rapid-fire rate, but low damage:

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There are three more weapons - laser gun, magic gun, and rocket gun. Each of these has different damage values. Originally I planned to implement the overheat mechanic, but ran out of time and passion to do that.

It was fun implementing the flame that appears when the ship is taken down. It is done as a particle effect, as the ship simply constantly emits flame particles when burning, and they get removed once their animation ends. Similar to how the bullets interact with enemies.

If you want to download this game, here’s the cartridge:

The next game on my list is a puzzle platformer. For now, I’m not sure if I will have time or passion to do it, and I honestly don’t know what types of puzzles should it have. We’ll see. I already have a pretty decent engine for a platforming game, so it’s a good time to refine it.

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Game3 w2/3

Sun, 24 Sep 2023 20:55:00 +0300

Another week passed, but I didn’t manage to squeeze out much spare time to make any significant progress with the game. Not like I didn’t do anything, but the game is far from being playable. This week I, unfortunately, could spend only a single day working on a game, because every day after work I had some personal stuff to take care of, which took all of my after-work hours. But it doesn’t matter, the challenge is a challenge! Hopefully, the next week will be a bit less busy. Although the stuff happening right now is very exciting and very important, so if the next week is busy again - so be it.

Anyway, here’s the progress so far:

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It’s a prototype. I’m experimenting with enemy patterns, like a simple sine wave, or tracking enemies. No collision has been implemented yet. This is my plan for the next and final week. As well as doing more animation, as the ship is just a cardboard right now, making weapons work, and not just fly with you, and implementing a scoring system. Probably that’s the most I’ll be able to do.

Another thing I want to look into is rotating sprites, as I want to spawn meteorites semi-randomly after some time passes in the game, so the game becomes harder. These meteorites will shatter, and smaller parts will also damage the player, making it harder to maneuver. But that’s probably the least prioritized thing as of this moment.

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Game3 W?/4

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 01:59:00 +0300

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:

Movement animations

Explosion animations

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:

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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.

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