Ships Ahoy! Dev Diary - 21 JUN
16 JUN 2020
Today was dedicated to the pirate ship Asteroids clone. I wanted to do the sprites myself, but I’m realizing how hard it really is. Making a 16x16 pirate ship felt impossible, and even the final product I’m not completely in love with. However, this is just another practice on quick and clean code, so I decided it was better to move on. One of the challenges is to do something unique that Asteroids does not employ, so I’m going with firing from the side of your ship like a real boat, and possibly coin collection that can be destroyed by the “asteroids?”
17 JUN 2020
Almost managed to get the pirate ship game complete but I hit the end of the day and knew it was time for a break. I had hardly taken a second to blink working on it so hard, making all the assets and adding sound/score. I’m really enjoying pouring myself into this because there are plenty of ways to spin the original game while still keeping it true to the original concept. The hope is to have it done by the end of the week. Some issues involve spawning the ships randomly, resetting the match on death, and having a lose screen. Otherwise, it looks great!
20 JUN 2020
I had no idea I still had so much to pour into it. Two more very full days were required to get it just where I wanted it. I added the rest of the art assets needed like explosions and textures for the buttons, got the rest of my sound effects in, and I improved the game overall. Spawn rates are an adjustable variable in the inspector that adds 1 extra ship to the scene every X number of seconds, with hard-coded padding of 5+ seconds per tick so that the game doesn’t escalate too quickly. Everything else was fairly standard polish: score screen, lives counter, credits UI, etc. Glad to have it cranked out though!
21 JUN 2020
Thanks to a donation from a buyer on Itch, I asked if they had any requests to see in the game. They joked that a solid steel ship would be fun, but I actually thought it could work. It wasn't especially hard to implement, the color scheme for a treasure boat was swapped to hues of grey, and the script was tweaked to make them invulnerable. This is a fun element to add because it makes obstacles for the player and also satisfies my promise. The game is fully implemented and awaiting a YouTube video.
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