Dev Log Ship Game - 26 OCT

26 OCT 2020

Today was spent making sure that the concept of powerups work. Rather than specifically making any, I simply created powerup managers and pickup classes that any powerup could derive from. This way, when it comes to actually making powerups, it will be much easier to just have a set of ways that they improve the player and call the powerup class with it. So far, I assume I’m only going to need things like lifespan, permanent, amount, and respawn time. The rest will likely come from the powerup itself

27 OCT 2020

Now that powerup shells are complete, I wanted to get the room generation working as well. Because the game is fairly straightforward, I figured the fun could instead come from the uniqueness of each level. Given that it’s a ship game, there’s no need for ramps or missing sections of the map, so instead I added islands that cover different portions of the ocean. For now, I just want to make sure I CAN generate the map by an adjustable columns vs rows variables, so I’ll just have vast sections of ocean spawning with walls that will be deactivated if touching other maps. This caused it to be a sandbox (water box?) of varying sizes.

28 OCT 2020

One thing I thought could be fun was having seeds generated for each map. With this, I’m able to reuse a map over and over if it’s better for testing and may even be able to display that to the player so they can choose their favorite map. I also added a “map of the day” bool that uses a seed based on the ticks since the start of the current day. This would be helpful for having everyone playing the game to get the same seed without having to look up codes, and it wouldn’t require coming up with new ones each time.

30 OCT 2020

All room designs are complete and spawn randomly throughout the map. I made it that blank rooms are more common so that there are vast expanses of ocean, but that islands randomly dot the map to make it more interesting to navigate around. So far, the preexisting ships handle the generation well, still knowing how to obstacle avoid and find each other, but that is solely based on if I put them at the origin and just lay the patrol points in space. Next, I’d like them to patrol to each location.