Hello everyone!

Well, this is my first Jam, and im hoping to do a game similar to space invaders, where we have to destroy the evil aliens before they steal the water from the planets!

My goal is currently to make a playable level (hopefully fun, but we'll see :P ). I'll be making the game in construct 2, and i will try to do both the graphics assets and the game itself by myself. 

So far, i've started making the main menu and the setup, where hopefully i will be able to do a screen where the player can enter his/her name and choose a portrait to represent him/her!

Good luck to everyone!

Sounds good! I'm going to make first the gameplay, then the interface. Let's see where this goes. :)

Dev Log 14-07-2018

I've added a place holder for one of the enemy types and made it move up and down while firing randomly.

I might be changing the way they move... making each of the enemies to have their own speed, but i dont know if that would be too distracting... i guess there is only one way to find out.

After that i will be making the player ship, making it move and hopefully firing!

Nice idea, and it sounds like a perfect project for a two-week jam, not too big and not too small. Good luck!

awesome!! it's great that you've already got the enemies working!

Dev Log 15-07-2018

So i changed it so all the enemies doesnt do the same movement. I also made it so they take damage, currently the "Eliminators" as i call them (The red ones) takes two hits to get destroyed (There is no explosion yet since this sprites are placeholders i hope :P )

Another change is that the player ship now also takes damage, after being hit three times it will be destroyed.

So... the general workflow would be:

1) The player starts the game

2) Clicks on the start button

3) Enters the captain name and chooses a captain, hopefully each captain will have a different bonus, for example, one could be faster, another harder to kill, etc. I havent decided this yet.

4) Clicks Play!

5) A small dialog between the captain and the planet or object being defended happens

6) Enemies arrive!

The only thing at this point that worries me is the art side, because im a programmer not really an artist, hopefully i have some software that i will mention later that can help me with backgrounds, the captains etc, however for the ships.... i dont have anything, so... i guess it will have to do with my ugly drawings :D

And since this is a 2 weeks jams i guess i should start working a some graphics!

hey great job! this is a pretty solid outline for the game's progression of scenes, and you can definitely scope it up gently as you go along (ie you can probably skip coding dialogue until you implement other stuff). keep up the good work!

Dev Log: 16-07-2018

I added some art! (Thank you Portrait Wizard!) I recommend that software if you are like me that cant draw to save my own life! :P

This is the previous screen before starting the game, where you choose a captain (only two for now) and you set up a name. Yes... i still need to add backgrounds.

After you choose the captain and input its name then you click "Play!" and the next screen appears:

Where some dialogs will appear (Need to think what to write there!), and after that the enemies arrives!

I made the enemies spawn randomly, however the problem i'm having now is that sometimes 2 enemies spawn at the same place (yes, even if random :-/ ), i have an idea on how to solve it, but i need to find a way to implement it in Construct 2....

So.... i guess thats it for now!

Dev Log: 17-07-2018

**** Warning wall of text incoming! ****

So, i was having issues with the random pleacement of the enemies, so thought about different ways to randomly spawn enemies in the level.

The first method i thought about was to just choose two random numbers for X and Y axis and just spawn an enemy at those locations, however this had a few issues. First i would need to be sure that the enemies do not overlap or just spawn above each other, and that the X and Y coordinates randomly choose were actually inside de vieweing area... to check all that with the way construct works was not my first option.... 

So i came up with another idea... spawn points! I quickly created a sprite and called it portal. Then made some copies of it and spread it around the level, of course this "portals" would be invisible to the player.

Then by using construct "command" to pick a random instance of an object i spawned the enemies on those randomly choosen portals! Should work right?

Well, it kind of did, the enemies did spawned randomly where they should... however there was a small issue, sometimes 2 or more enemies could spawn at the same portal! That was not good!

So i went back to thinking... how could i avoid enemies spawning at the same place??? My first idea was random numbers!

The theory was like this, i would use an array fill it with random numers and use those numbers to choose a portal and spawn the enemy there! Welp! nope, it didnt work! Again the random number generator was giving me some numbers twice!

Ok, then... if i cant make it generate unique random numbers then i can do is shuffle the array! So i filled the array with number from 0 to 5, and then after googling a bit found an example on how to shuffle an array, so now the array had numbers from 0 to 5 but shuffled! It should work right??? Wellllll..... nope :|

Yes, the array was shuffled and without duplicates but now the issue was that since it was numbers from 0 to 5 the enemies always spawned at the first 5 portals! Thats not what i wanted!

Well.... time to think a complete different approach! Since neither of the previous ways worked, i had to think something different, so while i was staring at my motionless portals i had an idea! What if i set a local variable to each portal that indicated if an enemy spawned at it??? Welllll..... it worked!

The idea is basically the following:

I created a loop, that would repeat itself while a variable was equal to 0. Inside this loop i would pick a random instance of a portal object and checked that its local variable spawned was equal to 0, if it was i would create an object at it and set the spawned variable to 1 so it doesnt get choosen again. After all that i had another variable that i used to count the amount of enemies spawned so i increased it by one. Then... i would check if this variable was equal to another one that had the amount of maximum amounts of enemies that i wanted for that wave, if it was equal then i would set the variable that was controling the while loop to 1 making it exit the loop!

Andddd so far is working! No bugs yet! i hope it stays that way!

Edit: Typo

Quite slick looking! Fantastic stuff, and nice problem solving!

Dev Log 18-07-2018

Today was mostly assets!

I added backgrounds, and changed the font.

Here how the main menu looks like now:

And this is how the Setup looks like now:

Its probably a good idea to replace those buttons with text so it looks all the same.

And finally the first level:

I seriously need to change the player ship, i dont like it :P

However i think the next step will be to implement a UI for the levels where i show at least the player score and health.

I also have an idea for an interesting mechanic for the game, but im still thinking about it. More news soon!

Any feedback is apreciated!

Dev Log 19-07-2018

What i focused today was mostly UI and tried to changed the workings of some things.

First i added a message showing at what wave currently the player is, i'm thinking of doing 4 waves of enemies and then a boss.

Then i added a "shield" (if you can call my drawing that :P) indicator at the top left showing how much "shields" the player have before dieing, and to the right side of the screen (also at the top) i added the player score! each enemy will have different scores when destroyed, however so far i only have one enemy type!

Then i spent the rest of my free time trying to rework some of the stuff i already made and was not happy how it was done.

For example, for the "Wave 1" message, i made it in a function so i dont have to repeat the same things each time i want to show the Wave message thingy.

I also wanted to do something similar with the enemy spawn "code"  and i kind of in part could. I managed to put the whole thing in a function so i dont have to repeat code. 

The current issue at the moment with the spawn code is to make it handle more than one type of enemy thats where im stuck at the moment :D

Here is a screenshot on how this changes looks:

Dev Log 21-07-2018

It will be a small update today because i dont have much time because of RL.

However! I managed to make that after all enemies dies another wave appears, and so on endlessly :P

Dev Log 22-07-2018

More progress today!

I add a Game Over screen!

As you can see there is some play data in the screen, like How many waves the player completed, amount of shots fired, how many it hitted and how many it missed, along ofcourse with the score.

I also replaced the buttons in the setup screen where the captain is selected so they matches the rest of the UI.

As far as gameplay, i changed the amount of enemies per wave, they should be increasing by one on each wave, and they should also fire faster. However because of this changes, and some other changes i made on how the game logic works, there is no longer an endless more, i could add this as a different game mode tho if people want that.

I also added music, tho for some reason sometimes it takes time to load, im thinking this is more a Construct 2 bug or something.

Also it was possible to start a game without selecting a captain... now that is fixed!

The next i have planned is:

• Add sound effects (shots & UI)
• Add the boss (after wave 5 or 6)
• Add a credits button to the main menu
• Add maybe a button to disable music or sound effects

Thanks for reading!

Dev Log 23-07-2018

Today will be another short post, i've added the following:

Sound effects, for shots and UI, it took more time than i thought, not because it was complicated, but because i got stuck with the UI buttons, and speaking of buttons, i have added two buttons to main level to disable the music and the sounds effects. I might move them around later.... 

I also added the credits screen to the main menu.

I still have the boss to add, hopefully i will make it in time by the deadline! I would like to also make a better player ship sprite (or find one somewhere) and add some explosions animations when the enemies are destroyed... and maybe the player ship.

We'll see if i make it in time!

Dev Log 24-07-2018

Well i didnt do as much as i wanted today, but still a bit of progress (Damn you Guild Wars 2!).

I've made an animation for when the enemy is destroyed, made it Asesprite :D

Here is the animation:

Dev Log 27-07-2018

I've published it on the jam!

In this last update (for now, i expect to continue developing the game after the jam), i have added the first boss!

Here is the boss!

I hope you enjoy it!