Posts from year 2016:
Weekly progress post #30: Mushrooms Tags: Games, ESA 2, Regular updates, Streaming Weekly progress post #29: All kinds of stuff Tags: Games, ESA 2, Streaming, Regular updates, Plans Weekly progress post #28: Animating rotating shields is difficult Tags: Games, ESA 2, Streaming, Regular updates, Plans Weekly progress post #27: New area!! Tags: Games, ESA 2, Streaming, Regular updates Weekly progress post #26: Debris and more Tags: Games, ESA 2, World generator, Regular updates, Streaming Weekly progress post #25: Barnacles! Tags: Games, ESA 2, Cloud Realm, World generator, Streaming, Regular updates Weekly progress post #24: Progress on all projects Tags: Games, ESA 2, Cloud Realm, World generator, Regular updates, Streaming Weekly progress post #23: Design issues Tags: Games, ESA 2, Plans, Regular updates, Streaming, World generator Weekly progress post #22: Boss things Tags: Games, ESA 2, Streaming, Regular updates Weekly progress post #21: Boss things! Tags: Games, ESA 2, Regular updates, Streaming, World generator
Posted on 2016-09-08 23:53
(I’m really awful at naming these posts)
Despite me being somewhat stressed, today’s stream was fairly productive! I added a new block, a new trap, a new enemy, finished a room and mostly implemented another. All the rooms I’ve worked on for the past few weeks are really bare-bones visually, though. I’m really happy with the redesigned dropper bug from ESA 1 shown in the gif!
Next week should see some pretty interesting stuff unless I get stuck with designing other stuff!!
Posted on 2016-09-04 02:22
Today’s stream was somewhat late and lasted only 2 hours, but I still added a whole bunch of new stuff, such as 2 new rooms, 1 new enemy and some level hazards. I’m starting to feel slightly better about some of my design choices regarding the current area, but it’ll be very interesting to get some tester feedback on things such as the general level of platforming skill required there. Oh well!!
No work done on the other projects this week. :(
Posted on 2016-08-25 23:40
I finished a largeish, spoilery cutscene I had started working on outside of the stream, added a new room and implemented 2 new enemies! I’m a bit unsure as to how to approach some of the new rooms, but I have a pretty good general idea (maybe) of how I’d like to game to progress from here.
I’m starting to feel a bit disappointed in certain game flow things, though; I’ll have to look at that at some point so that it wont become an actively progress-hindering factor. Mainly it feels like the player has a lot of mobility already at this point, and it’s hard to design interesting rooms and especially enemies to provide challenge but also be interesting! Also I’m a bit unsure about the game’s difficulty curve at the moment, but that’ll be handled during testing anyway.
No work on other projects today.
Posted on 2016-08-17 23:52
Today’s stream was spent on an entirely new area in ESA 2! I added 3 new rooms, 2 new enemies and a new environmental hazard. The new area feels somewhat static right now but hopefully some animated machinery and such can alleviate that. Moving platforms are proving to be problematic once again, and a feature related to them I was planning for today didn’t make it. I’ll have to look at that later.
No work done on Map Generator or Snake Game, although I’ve worked a lot on the former during the past week.
Posted on 2016-08-12 01:21
Today I made the basics of a new tileset to the game; my intention was to get to work on a new area today but alas, things took a bit longer than I thought they would and I didn’t really feel too motivated to actually work on that. I added a new enemy type, shown above, along with random floating debris that can be seen while floating in space. I’ll have to draw quite a few variations of that, though.
I also worked some on the map generator, mostly fixing bugs. I feel simultaneously excited & intimidated by the things I’m working on right now in that project.
Posted on 2016-08-04 00:57
There they are! I added 3 new enemies to ESA 2 today along with tiny tweaks. Making them took more time than I estimated, but it was fun and I finally got around to implementing a ricocheting effect for enemies with shells.
Snake game got also some early work on the player losing while inside their plane. Making a nice-looking effect for that will be really time-consuming, I’m afraid! Also fixed various smaller bugs here and there.
No map generator work tonight.
Posted on 2016-07-28 00:34
Today’s ESA 2 progress was way slower than I’d have hoped, mainly due to a huge amount of tiny annoying glitches related to the new feature I’ve been working on. I tinkered with those and added some new content but ultimately gave up on trying to get everything working and instead decided to look at the glitches outside of the stream.
Snake game saw a return since I had figured out a way to fix a really horrible crashng bug in it! I spent most of the stream implementing features of the Snake Game engine in lua, but progress was fairly good and the attempted lua fix seems to do what it’s meant to, namely increase the FPS (although I had MMF’s debugger open while testing for a long time and interpreted the related slowdown as indicative of additional needed optimization). There were a couple weird and potentially annoying glitches left in the game after the conversion was done, but hopefully those can be ironed out.
Map generator saw the addition of lighthouses! That is all.
Posted on 2016-07-22 00:22
In today’s stream I ended up having to give up my original plans due to a particularly nasty design issue. I might have an idea of how to fix it thanks to Mokesmoe suggesting neat solutions, but I’ll have to implement that still and it probably wont be nice! I ended up working more on little details and adding a bunch of powerups along with polishing certain bits that needed it. In the end progress was pretty nice overall. I also implemented a bit of stuff for the world generator, but again public opinion made me turn back to ESA 2 after a while.
Posted on 2016-07-16 00:22
Today I managed to finish the third and final boss of the first “part” of ESA 2! There’s still a bit of work to be done on the visuals of the boss itself along with some extra cutscenery, but after that it’ll be time to leave the first area of the game for a good while! I’m happy about finally getting this far while simultaneously feeling sared about the scope of the game. Hopefully things will go at least somewhat smoothly in the future…
Posted on 2016-07-09 00:59
Today’s stream was spent on a new boss in ESA 2! This one is possibly somewhat “nostalgic” for players of ESA and will also hold some (hopefully) neat plot importance. I got the basic structure of the fight working fairly quickly, but the arena and everything related to the encounter is really bare-bones and in need of heavy polish.
I started the stream with the map generator but quickly changed to ESA 2 due to people mentioning wanting to see it being worked on, haha. Apparently the stream was also picked as a “community pick”, meaning that it was showing as the “main” stream of the #gamedev tag. Cool??