Posts on Ballistic Assembly Devlog

22 - new look and new levels

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:23:10 +0000

this week mostly concerned itself with levels and tutorials, and the first real art has been added

level scripts

this week i made good inroads on a new way to handle dialog and tutorials. i wanted something lightweight that i could easily edit, as opposed to the popups which are still quite clunky, or just making modified versions of the GameLevel class which would turn into headache central.

so each level now has a slot for its specific levelscript which is mounted to a Node when a level scene is instanced, this comes with a bunch of extra methods to do the sort of stuff that you’d usually want, and its mounting means that async commands are killed automatically when the mounted Node goes out of the scene (such as returning to the main menu). other features;

21 - characters, visual effects, and other games

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 13:22:31 +0000

a lot happened this week

character tutorial

the tutorials have been missing something, as learning a game isn’t just learning a dry list of controls.

i released that theres no way of sharing level specific info in a diegetic way.

a tutorial popup can tell someone what to press, and an objective can tell them what to do, but nether can adequately give tips or tricks, or explain why something is happening.

20 - room designs

Fri, 29 May 2026 13:22:16 +0000

this week we worked on a bit of everything so its a bit hard to pin down.

Getting an artist

we’ve got an artist contracted on now who will be making some better looking stuff for the game. some have said that my 30second art is fallible and while i don’t believe that i do believe that a being able to tell the difference between a conveyor and a rotator might be good, gameplay wise.

19 - a lost week

Fri, 22 May 2026 07:23:00 +0000

this week i’ve been very sick, so theres not much work to show. the only progress was into changing the projectile vector calculation system and i had to abort on doing that half way though.

preface, projectiles aren’t actually projectiles in BA, they’re made up of 3 arrays; position, vector, and munition. we then simulate the movement of a projectile sprite each tick to make it look like its flying.

18 - post demo polish

Thu, 14 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

this week is another short week here in sweden, this is why people accuse swedish devs of never doing any work. anyway, i did some limited tests of the demo with some players and it exposed a ton of bugs.

i pretty quickly found that some bugs were not reproducible in the desktop version of the game vs the browser version so i did some work to address that.

Log Exports

when building for web, godot handily exposes JavaScriptBridge , which has a bunch of stuff for running in the browser. the most salient here being download_buffer. its a handy little fn that takes a string array and just sends a download request to the client.

17 - updating the demo

Fri, 08 May 2026 15:01:00 +0000

this week was rushed as i hadn’t published last weeks blog either due to a short week in sweden and needing to attend sake festivalen.

this week mostly consisted of polish before updating the demo, which is updated as of today. this new version adds explosives and destructible buildings as well as some polish and qol.

there isn’t too much technical stuff to discuss this week as i’ve been holding off on big upgrades until explosives had been pushed, now i can move on to ray munitions which dont have a ceiling cap, allowing interplanetary firing ranges which could be fun.

16 - events and triggers

Fri, 01 May 2026 10:26:00 +0000

this week was a short one due to valborg here.

Munition triggers

we want munitions to be capable of various actions driven by the player. some examples of what the player should be able to make:

flak
- rounds that explode in air after N seconds or within proximity
shaped rounds
- rounds that dont explode on impact, but instead explode when another part of the munition hits the target
guidance systems
- change the round trajectory of the round up or down by some nº based on where the target was on firing
cluster munitions
- at distance x, unweld from peers
hybrid rockets
- when speed below x, engage rocket system

but we want to have the smallest instruction set possible. what are these instructions and how do we handle them?

15 - explosives and their reproductions

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 15:10:00 +0000

this week saw a lot of work take place on explosions and how to simulate them. it ended up being quite iterative and a long process to get it into a place where it feels good.

whats the purpose of explosives?

gameplay wise explosions exist to
remove large numbers of weak blocks
make a projectile remain impactful even if its kinetic force is low (mortars are an example of this)
pierce very hard blocks with shaped explosions
to change trajectory mid flight

they pay for this cost by being risky within the factory and probably by having strings attached like no welding, and by being quite shitty as physical projectiles; they’re weak and lightweight and so unsuited to being a projectile.

14 - building blocks for building blocks

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 12:36:00 +0000

this week was about reinvention and reenforced the idea that a negative result can still be a result. i spent the first half of the week remaking how building cells were constructed, with the idea that they’d use a texture per material and be generated as simple polygons. this proved to be a massive pain in the ass and looked like ass too, so instead i’m sticking to good old cells with extras.

13 - the return of the projectile

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:06:00 +0000

 i'm back from a holiday in germany and resuming work. its proving a little tricky, i wrote up a list of things to do before i left but of course info settles out of the brain after several days of drinking wheat beer.

Buildings and explosives

hope no feds are reading this.

in the few days this week that i was able to get to work, i looked into explosives and how they can be implemented and it quickly lead to a Hal Changes A Lightbulb moment where it required that i look into buildings, which means looking into building cells, which means looking into prpjectile mechanics.

12 - displays

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 12:41:00 +0000

this week focused on updating the display entities and polish for the itch version. there wont be an update next week as i’m going to germany.

display entities

they’ve been in a pretty dodgy state as they’re one of the oldest parts of the game. so with the introduction of the tiles from last week i decided to fix them.

the way the factory works is that the state that defines the factory is disconnected from the displays. is each time a factory machine or component is added, it will be assigned a display.

12 - telemetry and tilemaps

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 15:27:00 +0000

this week was busy, with a few large things happening, and i’m going away next week so its well timed.

bug tracking

the game was sent to a few friends last week who tried it out. it was interesting to see what people did and didnt click with, and some very interesting bugs were found. a personal favourite was a ‘magic bullet’ that by a combination of factors, managed to push its inaccuracy value over 100% leading to some very strange behaviours (namely flying all over the place and stopping in mid air).

11 - tutorials

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:48:00 +0000

this week was all about how to play the game and how to teach someone to play the game. i have a background in designing support systems so this isn’t too alien to be but the way games can deliver information and what assumptions can be made is very different.

tutorial on tutorials

i talked about learning a few weeks ago and what info needs to be delivered to the player, but not about how its done so much.

10 - music and menus

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 16:13:00 +0000

this week had a little bit of avoidance and i’m putting off doing a big change that i dont want to do, so i’m working on other stuff in the meantime

This week saw the creation of a main menu. i like clean and simple menus so i’m taking inspiration from factorio. simple inputs on a dark background with large margins. i also wanted to use godots inbuilt system as it takes care of controller inputs and tabbing.

9 - levels and learning

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 13:49:00 +0000

this week focused on levels and making it easier to make them, plus quite a bit of thought about how to do things in future.

Learning the game

How do we introduce stuff? In what order? What do we even have to introduce?

This is what we need the player to know

really basic stuff
- goal of the game
- controls
  - camera movement
  - selection pallet
  - tile placement/removal
  - undo/redo?
concepts
- how bullets fly

8 - flying projectiles return

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 13:31:00 +0000

This week has been busy with preparations for Chinese new year but game wise it was focused on getting the game towards a state where someone would be willing to try it

most of the week was put towards bringing back physical projectiles. previously we had this but it was removed as i remade the trajectory system. the problem then was readding it as the new system didnt make it as easy as expected.

7 - the road to a demo and level managment

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:51:00 +0000

a very busy week, with lots of non-game dev related updates like starting a business and doing hunting homework. anyway on to the point

the game feels like its made huge progress in the last few days as i pull together various disparate systems that have been worked on over the last few weeks and they all actually work together.

looking slightly better

demo

in order to get a fun game, you need a lot of testing. factorio famously was tested for many years before launch, the same could be said about doom eternal

6 - enemy and player updates

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 14:47:00 +0000

This last week focused on making enemies (in the game).

Enemies

We had an enemy back when the simulator was 3d, so much of this reinvention but with the advantage of hindsight.

For graphics, I was able to easily reuse the turret that the player uses as its model, and with the building component system we can make an enemy building in any shape we want which will be handy later.

5 - states and weights

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:44:00 +0000

this week focused on the state manager, as well as more projectile calculations

looks

the new 2d setup looks like ass tbh, so much so that i can’t figure out what is happening some of the time. to remedy this i added more feedback on firing and hitting of building rooms, as well as an ammo switcher.

firing effect

new projectile calculations

ammo switcher showing off different kinds of ammo

4 - what is a projectile, really?

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 05:20:00 +0000

3d => 2d

reinvention was the name of the game this week.

with the 3d shooting scene getting too complex it was tentitively replaced with a 2d iteration that uses PhysicsRayQueryParameters2D to do calculations instead and so far its looking very good

i had to remake

level cell generation
raymarching
balistic calculations for drop
make new turret art
more that has been forgotten

but the results were worth it. we can still fire a ton of projectiles without sacrificing performance, and destructible building physics were a easy step once the remake was done, thinking back to how much pain it was to make the raymatching the first time it very easily came together on the second go. hindsight makes a difference.

3 - throwing out the christmas wrapping

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 10:58:00 +0000

christmas is over and will be missed.

the last few weeks changes have been pretty big as i’ve already found myself in techdebt.

the way that projectiles are made, the raycasts they use, and the reflection between zones for trajectory calculation were all a bit overcomplicated, and last week i tried to add buildings and it all went wrong.

i wanted to make the enemy more complicated. a game mechanic i want to include is visible destruction of the enemy for player feedback, as well as “important” points within an enemy,to encourage the player to aim for one bit of an enemy over another.

2 - quality of life and balance of projectiles

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 16:24:00 +0000

this week was the last week i’m working this year, i may tinker here and there but generally its time off.

the week was split between finishing off the ammo intake system i started last week, and adding some much needed ux to the factory side of the game

ammo intake woes

there was a lot of iteration on the ammo intake system, and while a lot of it was a success (modular ammo works now), it turns out aerodynamics and drag are complicated.

1 - welders, fusion, and composed munitions

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 14:49:00 +0000

This is the start of a blog on a little game i’m making. the idea of this is to track what i’ve added and my thoughts, similar to factorio’s FFF

this week has been pretty productive. its early so theres tons to do with a lot in flux.

on the factory side

the factory side with walls and some spawners

added walls around levels, and added a core piece: the welder.