Plenty to say this week. Got a lot of stuff done and crap. At some points it seems a lot more rewarding to do a game yourself. Just because I control all the elements, and the fact that if I find something wrong with the game I can touch it up without consulting someone I'm working with :P I still like working with artists though. Hopefully I get at least one meaningful response this time.

12/14/08

Okay, completely disregard the talking and the faces. They're placeholders until I get my voice actors to do their lines. I know the faces are ugly and they don't fit, but the first faces were even uglier and fit even less.

I don't feel like typing out everything I've done this week because there's just so much. I've been working on this baby in every second of my free time, cause the money this game generates would be great to have around Christmas. I want to have it done, in complete beta stage by the end of next week.

How do you guys like the menu and the little bird logo thing? Since this game is somewhat of a remake of my old game, Gradium:Enemies Inbound, I took the logo and the menu music from that game and worked it up. I even tried to replicate the menu font Proxer used.

There are health pick ups, if you don't find any tell me though. I'm going to move the bosses health bar to the bottom of the screen and his death is going to be more spectacular later on.

Not much else to say.

12/6/2008, Flamethrower
12/6/2008, Slicer

The two ships in action, with a bit more particle effects. I've changed the way the flame appears because it was too processor heavy before. The sounds are balanced, pretty good in my own opinion. I've added a few aesthetic things, and a few things I need to change visually.

The blade ship was a design my friend game up with. The ships blades spin quickly but it has no primary weapon, so this ship is more about dodging bullets rather then destroying ships. The challenge comes in when you have to get close to boss enemies to destroy them.

I think the concept of having each ship bring different gameplay to the table is going good. I will probably add a ship that acts like this ship in this game, but just have it control with arrows. That would bring me to a total of 5 ship designs, along with 1 unlockable.

Another thing I want to touch on is level design. I don't want the levels to feel too crowded or too easy, you know. So I want to know how much challenge everyone gets out of the game right now.

I'm taking the logo for my old Gradium game, and revamping it for this game. When you load up the swf, the logo will sit there for a while, and it now overlay the health bar.

Do you guys believe the health bar would work top left or bottom left?

11/28/2008
I think it's smarter to add the new stuff to the top so people don't have to scroll down.

This new update shows one of the few Ships I've been working on, along with almost all the enemies so far. I need to work on my level design, and getting the ships that come out to be well placed and shiz, but that can come after all the game mechanics are worked out.

The new ship is a Flamethrower, and it's very powerful up close. The further away you are the less damage it does, and when bullets eventually start flying every where, you won't be able to get into the enemies faces like you can in the demo as of now. As you get further away it does less damage too. How do you guys like this ship? Next week, I'll show you the other one I'm working on at this moment in time.

I really want to spice up the enemy designs, and have a constant stream of new enemies coming. There's a lot of shit you can do with enemies in a space shooter, and I'm going to try to get as many enemies in there as I can, as unique as I can.

So yeah

11/21/2008

This is what I've got so far. I have the basic movement engine done, and a lot of stuff going on that you can't see. I'm not very good at drawing, but I think I'm making the whole thing work. 3 enemy ship designs are done, and the enemy ships are going to be made of the colors Blue and Grey while you're ship is Red and Grey. In the end I want to have about 4-6 ships for the player to choose from, and each choice should really change how you play the game.

Like right now, you're using the ship that has the most average gameplay. Dodge bullets, shoot, etc. In the end this ship will be one of the only ships that can level up based on how many enemies you kill. That's how this ship is going to work.

Another ship, called the duck, will have no leveling up, but will have some seriously epic weaponry. But the ship will be huge and clunky. To combat the clunkiness, the ship will have a rechargeable shield. The ship will absorb all bullets, but if another ship hits you you'll take damage.

Also, all ships will possibly have places where you can equip items into them, items that increase speed, damage, shooting speed and such, but I'm not exactly TOO sure about that.

My friend and I came up with quite a bit of ideas for the game, but I don't want to talk about everything. I would really to have this game out before the 5th of December, so that's the deadline I'm shooting for. This is also going to be my first game in AS3.