2D Shooter Dev Diary - 13 JUN

18 MAY 2020

Was able to implement the taller enemy relatively easily because of how modular the short enemy’s script is. A few tweaks in word choice and the tall enemy is practically the same thing! The only difference is that he is two units tall, with the first unit blocking damage. He also shoots more bullets at a faster rate and has extra health. Marvelous.

22 MAY 2020

Life has gotten fairly busy again, but I’m going to stick with it! It’s a little discouraging seeing dozens of hours of work each day with task upon the task being cranked out come to such a slow crawl, but the idea is to finish up the last little bit of programming before a massive amount of time will be specifically dedicated to focus on the level design. Fortunately, this aligns with some of my work, so I’ll be able to go back to giving the game my 100% in a few weeks. For the time being, I want to make sure I get the programming ready for level design. This required me to get an intro cutscene script/scene ready as well as credits and a win condition. 

28 MAY 2020

The past two days were dedicated to a demo for a potential future puzzle project, simply named SpriteMover for now. This was a great opportunity to take a step back from my longer project and get some creative juices flowing. I also took this time to make my code cleaner, learn better practices for scripting and commenting, and wanted to make all the assets myself. Other than the music, it was all made by me using tutorials. I’m very pleased with how it turned out and intend to create more of it in the future!

10 JUN 2020

I have a lot of great ideas on what I would make the intro cutscene, but unfortunately, my understanding of that and my resources are limited. I feel that flooding the screen with text is a bit old hat, but there isn’t much more I know how to do. I’m struggling to get very basic sprites out, let alone detailed ones that are going to be performing for an action flick. Instead, I’ve decided to go with floating silhouettes of space debris with a single ship flying off to match the narrative. It isn’t gorgeous, and if I have time I would like to improve it, but with how many other things need to get done, the amount of time I spent drawing all the ship debris plus the space background plus the fading text and everything that came with it sums up about how much time it deserves.

Fortunately, I made it skippable for players who don’t care to read a wall of text. 

11 JUN 2020

Looking through the list, I’m actually realizing I have almost nothing left to program. As such, I’m trying to make sure I work hard on the art and design, but that means I have little to physically show. For example, today was dedicated to looking up oldschool games’ start menus to see what I should create. Originally I wanted the menu items to be fully pixel-arted buttons, but when looking through other games I realized that the level of graphics mine will be boasting tends to stick to the late 80s/early 90s where the main menu was usually just text. 

One heated debate was also if the controls should be evident immediately to the player. Unlike a controller that only has so many buttons, a keyboard layout almost has to be explained to the player otherwise they could be stuck pressing everything to improvise. My stance was that it is common in computer games to press ESC to check out the menu in which I would have the button layout, whereas a counterpoint was that you should never have to. I don’t want to force players to read a button layout, but it seems more organic than slapping them over the head with it. As a compromise, I believe I may have the first rescuable crewmember simply have a blinking “R” over their head to indicate how to save them. 

12 JUN 2020

I do believe that a GDD will be absolutely pivotal to begin with in the future. I made the mistake of wanting to make something so badly that I rushed into programming without having a vision of the end product. This is making retroactively fixing old scripts a bit of a nightmare, and also making half of the time now spent to thinking about what I want rather than implementing.

That’s not all bad, though. This project has taught me a lot about scoping and planning. Why just the menu system today took hours and hours because of the shoddy way I had it originally set up, but now I know how I should do it for next time. I thought about correcting everything, but this game is close to launch and I don’t think it’s appropriate to backpedal. The functions I want are there, it was just harder to implement than they should have been. Instead, I will just take these lessons to heart.

I think my biggest issue is that I don't want to create half-assed games. Yes, I'd be able to crank out more if they were just a box jumping around other boxes and shooting at circles, but I have a deep passion for making games, not concepts. Not to say there is anything wrong with mechanic driven games with simple art styles, but when I set out to make this game I wanted to make sure it was a fun space shooter, not evidence I can make an object move and remove other objects. It adds a lot of extra work, but it's important to me.