11 NOV 2023:
Put in quite a few hours this week, including most of yesterday! Above you can see how Scrapship looks when the whole screen is visible. The warping is because I'm forcing the game to change levels rapidly.
- Added in all level backgrounds:
- Levels 1 and 2 is a random planet background
- Level 3 is an asteroid field
- Level 4 is a random deep space background
- Level 5 is a black hole
- Ensured that music changes during level transitions
- Added the titlescreen back in.
- Asteroids can be destroyed (needs an animation though)
- Added option for Captions On/Off as there will be some voiceovers integrated later.
- Mostly done adding the shield fighters back in. The big win here was that I was able to reduce file size 80% by trimming with Aseprite and hand-jamming coordinates to reposition segments. I plan on doing this same thing to all the enemies.
- After much thought, I also made some last-minute design decisions:
- I got rid of the easy/normal/hard difficulty levels as the game is designed to adjust difficulty in-game anyways.
- Removed the railgun and ability to heal between levels. Because the game is designed for a short play experience (~15 minutes), I think it makes sense to have the game be harder rather than easier. So it will definitely be more roguelike in the sense that you only have one ship, one life! Also I was never happy with how the railgun looked as it was something I threw together in Blender.
Getting rid of things like this has also helped motivate me as it's less stuff to have to worry about.
So how close to done am I? It's always hard to tell. The parts that are left to do have already been done before, they just need to be re-integrated into the new build. Lots of copy and paste, but also sometimes I have to recalculate coordinates and make minor edits to graphics.
No promises, but things I will probably add in towards the end:
- Gamepad support
- Multiple languages for the captions (and maybe the audio?)
QUOTE OF THE WEEK:
"You must be prepared to work always without applause." -- Ernest Hemingway
Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!