itch.io

Nice physics platformer, like the vision cones on the cameras. Really wanted to shoot those big guys though!

Great concept with the clones and the space van! Really hard though, I don't think I ever rescued three of the hostages! Maybe I'm just too slow...

Good work though.

I can't seem to move and shoot at the same time, which makes it really tricky!

Needs keyboard controls I think.

Wooh that's tough!

Super Meat Boy meets Jetpac! Pretty unforgiving but at least you restart immediately for another try!

Nice work, reminds me of Auralux somewhat.

The mouse control needs a bit refining though, often in the heat of battle I couldn't seem to direct ships fast enough.

Really nice look, using the two robots together is cool, liked using the little robot to scope out the level first.

Nice lighting and graphics too.

@pouleyKetchoupp I did consider making it totally mouse controlled, but yes, I thought it would make it too easy. If I do a mobile version I'll have to rethink it I reckon.

@Grayt Apps Glad you liked it ! I had real problems with the cursor, I uploaded a new version a little while ago which just uses the default mouse cursor, as the cross hair graphic wouldn't work on Windows.

Nice graphics and lighting, very tricky to pilot the ship!

Cool sound effects too.

I have saved the Earth!

Radial layout works really well, especially liked that the boss had a different pattern and different music.

Great Defender type shooter, but I'm abducting the animals!

The feel is spot on, really nice job.

Love the concept of planting seeds on things to stop them shooting at you.

Good job I was invincible though, or I wouldn't have lasted two seconds!

To get it to run I had to do : -XstartOnFirstThread or I got an exception.

After that I click Play but nothing happens...

I'm on OSX 10.9.5 with Java 1.8.0_65

Great fun game, really like the simplicity of it, but it plays really well. Although it's pretty hard!

Going to have that tune stuck in my head for ever though...

Great concept, when everything starts spinning around on level 2 it get's pretty tough!

Like the circular viewport, works really well, and some really nice transitions between screens/levels as well.

Mmmm shiny!

The music fits really well, and I like that you can't really see behind the ship.

Great use of lights and particles, very pretty!

Oddly charming, I think with a bit more work this could turn into something pretty fun.

I like the idea of exploring different planets and bringing things back home to see how they interact.

Nice music!

Collect the firepower power ups to increase the firing rate!

Love the look of this, and like the turrets, although they always get me!

Sooo pretty! Really like the spiralling missiles.

Best look after him then! If you click the spiral on the space station, he'll get recalled and get his health back.

Okay, I've removed the custom cursor, I don't know why it wasn't rendering correctly on Windows. Will look into it.

Have uploaded a new version with the fix and a normal mouse cursor.

Okay, it looks like on Windows the mouse cursor graphic isn't showing correctly, it works fine on Linux/OS X.

I'll look into it and see if I can post a fix.

Thanks for looking at my game!

For me the mouse cursor is actually pretty big, it's a 32x32 sprite, not sure what's happened there. May be a Windows thing as I haven't tested it at all on there (will do though).

The gun speed increases as you collect powerups for it with the astronaut.

Instructions are on the game page, I did intend to have them in game but ran out of time...

This is great fun, bit tricky though! Still haven't managed to clear the level!

Great sense of immersion, really great use of sound. Okay, it's a bit like Lone Survivor, but it's really well done considering the time frame. Totally enjoyed it.

Enjoyed this, reminded me of Spectrum games from back I the day, must admit I got stuck after collecting the two batteries though and didn't escape....

Right I reckon that's it. I'm away at the weekend so I won't be able to do any more work then.

One last test of everything and then I'll release.

I'm relatively pleased with it, learnt a lot of new stuff, had fun taking part, so all good. Fingers crossed it doesn't just crash on other peoples machines!

Right, reckon I'm functionally complete now, time for a function freeze!

Should still have time to tidy up some of the graphics a bit more, and then balance gameplay.

The only thing I'm still not sure about is control, at the minute the turret/firing is keyboard controlled, the astronaut is mouse controlled. Which makes it a bit awkward...I was thinking of moving firing to the mouse, but I'd have to track the cursor with the turret which would probably make things too easy...will try and find a willing victim to try it out for me...

Probably won't have time to add in music though, not to worry, that was always last on the list.

Been a while since I posted an update here....

Haven't been able to work on my game as much as I would have liked over the last week or so, life type things getting in the way I guess. Anyway, I'm still going, focusing on trying to get all the functionality in this weekend, then spend next week bug fixing and polishing, hopefully tidying up some of the crappy graphics.

It's gotten to the point now where the code is starting to get a bit crufty, started out with great intentions as always but along the way little hacks and things creep in. Have a few unused components and systems, guess they aren't really doing any harm though.

I'm pretty new to Ashley and ECS systems in general, one of the things I don't think I've got right yet is interaction between different entities, mostly in response to events.

So I have a great big 'World' class which is the actual play screen, which has the listeners for keys (but not mouse, that ended up somewhere else??), and sets up the state, adding in entities etc. This is where I've been putting callbacks when things happen, but I'm never sure where to direct those callbacks...I don't have Entity classes as such, I just create them as and when needed...and it doesn't seem right to put that logic into the System classes...so it all ends up in this big (and getting bigger) class...I managed to take some of it out and create a Station class for the space station and its different entities and have been moving some of the functionality into here, but it still doesn't seem quite right.

Once I'm finished I'll have to go and check out everyone elses source code and see how they're doing it...

Been playing around with things a bit, before adding new features.

I've always wanted to make a game which had really big text scrolling along in the background, probably influenced by Jeff Minter or someone I think.

So I added a new system to do just that:

class BigTextSystem(i:Float) : IntervalSystem(i) {
    override fun updateInterval() {
        if (MathUtils.random(1,100) < 25) {
            engine.addEntity(Entity().apply {
                add(PositionComponent(Assets.VIEWPORT_WIDTH, 500f))
                add(MovementComponent(-850f, 0f))
                var msg = Assets.SOME_TEXT.get(MathUtils.random(0, Assets.SOME_TEXT.size - 1))
                add(TextComponent(msg).apply {
                    scale = 16.0f
                    colour = Color(223 / 255f, 113 / 255f, 38 / 255f, 0.75f)
                    front = false
                })
                add(BoundsCheckComponent(8000f))
            })
        }
    }
}

Also I've just discovered Kotlin's 'apply' function, as you can probably tell...

Here's a screenshot (it looks better in motion)

So I'm sticking with Spriter for now, and I'm done with the turret animation, spent way too much time on that...

Picked a nice new font though, and made a new logo:

Next I'm going to work on transitions between scenes, title to playing etc. Also started making some musics, using Caustic on Android.

So after a good initial start, I'm now at the point where everything is broken and horrible....yack...

I've been having problems with animation, and graphics. I'm not great at graphics work, but I'm giving it a go.

I'd decided to use Spriter Pro for animations, as I have a license for it and it gives me an excuse to try it, but I'm finding it a bit...dodgy...

I use Inkscape for all my graphic work, export as separate png's, import into Spriter, animate, export as sprite sheet png, import into libGDX and create an Animation. However Spriter seems to really mess up the image quality. I'm now exporting from Inkscape at 4 times the resolution I need, then scaling the final sprite sheet down in Gimp before importing into libGDX.

The other thing that bugs me is that Spriter doesn't seem to allow for any snapping/alignment, so everything is done by eye.

I only need pretty simple stuff, here's an example gif:

Either I'm missing something in Spriter, or I'm going about this the wrong way...

What does anyone else use for creating animations? Especially using graphics created in Inkscape ?

Sometimes I find the interop between Kotlin and libGDX (Java really) a bit odd, but when it comes together, it really does make for a lot less boilerplate:

var firing = Texture(Assets.TURRET_ANIMATION)
var tmp = TextureRegion.split(firing, firing.width, firing.height/10)
var firingFrames = Array<TextureRegion>(10, { i -> tmp[i][0] })
var firingAnimation = Animation(0.02f, *firingFrames)

testAnim.add(AnimationComponent(firingAnimation))

Here I'm trying out animations using a sprite sheet. This works in this instance because I only have one column in the sheet, hence mapping it straight into a 1 dimensional array.

I struggled a little with the Animation constructor because I thought I needed a badlogic.Array, I had a Kotlin array and couldn't get them to play nice together. Turns out Animation will take a varargs TextureRegion as argument which Kotlin's spread (*) operator will let us do from an Array.

Neato!

Added angular velocity to my movement/position systems

And the world turns!

Title screen actually looking like a title screen now, time to polish up the graphics I reckon.

Now got me some breaking up asteroids:

Ah thanks!

The starfield is a single star image, added every x seconds with random scale and velocity :

package org.sturgeon.sweeper.systems

import com.badlogic.ashley.core.Entity
import com.badlogic.ashley.systems.IntervalSystem
import com.badlogic.gdx.graphics.Texture
import com.badlogic.gdx.math.MathUtils
import org.sturgeon.sweeper.Assets
import org.sturgeon.sweeper.components.BoundsCheckComponent
import org.sturgeon.sweeper.components.MovementComponent
import org.sturgeon.sweeper.components.PositionComponent
import org.sturgeon.sweeper.components.VisualComponent


class StarfieldSystem(var i:Float) : IntervalSystem(i) {
    
    override fun updateInterval() {
        var star = Entity()

        var t = Texture(Assets.STAR)

        var pc = PositionComponent(Assets.VIEWPORT_WIDTH+100,
                MathUtils.random(0f, Assets.VIEWPORT_HEIGHT),
                t.width.toFloat(), t.height.toFloat())

        var scale = MathUtils.random(0.1f, 1.2f)
        pc.scaleX = scale
        pc.scaleY = scale

        star.add(pc)

        star.add(VisualComponent(t, 0))
        star.add(MovementComponent(MathUtils.random(-300f, -100f), 0f))
        star.add(BoundsCheckComponent())

        engine.addEntity(star)
    }
}

Spent a bit more time pottering with yon jam entry.

I now have a pretty good vertical slice of a game:

Start screen -> playing screen (with score and health) -> Game over screen

While all the parts are relatively basic, it means that even if I were to release now, there's kind of a game in there (albeit not a very good one). A minimum viable product if you will.

Now it's a case of adding features, and polishing what's currently there.

Applying Agile software principles to game development, oh yes.

Had a good bit of time to spend on my jam entry today, made some decent progress.

Now have basic collisions, plus a title screen, and a star field!

Starfield!

Really enjoying working with Ashley, once there are a few systems in adding new entities is really easy!

Also added in Aurelien Ribon's Universal Tween Engine, time to get Easing!

Also must work out how to embed images/gifs into a post!