Posts

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. ...

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). ...

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. ...

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 Main Menu 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. ...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

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. ...