It's the very end of February, and I am proud to say that Space Wars : Galactic Battlefight is officially finished!

Reflections:
Above all else, my goal for this project was simply to finish it. I set myself a time limit, put a cap on features, and focused on getting things done. My haphazard attempt at maintaining a devlog here and making things available online has been an exciting new experience.

I made this in python using pygame, with sounds from sfxr and paint.net for the ship images. Python's always a treat to program in, but I found the difficulty and uncertainty of putting together executables, along with an inability to capture gameplay footage on windows something of a disadvantage. In the future, I think I'd like to try something like GameMaker to experiment with ideas, and avoid spending time doing everything from scratch.

Apologies for the extremely delayed update.  The good news is that I finally managed to put together a simple demo video showing the current state of the game and some sample gameplay.  Pygame does not make this easy, and I ended up outputting screenshots and stringing them together into an mpg... I'm definitely reconsidering using pygame for anything beyond quick and dirty prototypes in the future.

The bad news is that my day job's crunch time has kept me from so much as thinking about SWGBF for the past few months, so my self-imposed end-of-year deadline is going to be pushed back to late February.

Come hell or high water, I will finish what I started.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_8ZdTQP3pM

Name redundancy! Smiley Two words denoting a space setting, and three for a conflict. Although I could also read that as increasingly specific...

I'll narrow it down even more for the sequels/expansion packs -- SWGBf: Extra-terrestrial Conflict, and SWGBf: Astro-Skirmish

Incoming Update!

- Made the UI easier to understand
- Added ship animations
- Added some sounds
- New Fleet!

Fleet B:

Cuirassier x 2
    Charges into battle to slash and tear enemy all enemy ships in front of it

ChargedLaser(?)
    Fires a laser so far-reaching and deadly that it takes a full turn to charge

Rhino
    A slow, ponderous obelisk... until it fires its rockets and hurtles across the map, doing massive damage to the first thing it hits!

That's a good suggestion, thanks.  I think once the UI's a little less
incomprehensible (and the ships a bit less hideous) I'll definitely put together
a video to demonstrate it.

Here it is, folks. After a worryingly long hiatus, the triumphant release of

Space Wars : Galactic Battlefight!

Space Wars : Galactic Battlefight (SWGBF) is a 1v1 turn-based video board game pitting fleets of hyper-futuristic warships against one another in a desperate bid for control of the galaxy.

Numeric Superiority!
In this distant future, humanity has developed beyond the need for percentages, probabilities, and numbers higher than 8.

Go in from behind!
Strike the enemy's undefended flanks or rears for massive damage bonuses

Push your imagination to the limit!
Forget everything you know about space ships or artwork drawn by conscious human beings! Please.

Hi everybody.  I'm an aspiring game developer from Canada.  I've been playing games most of my life, I think I got my first taste of programming with Dark Forces II modding, and after my first real CS course in high school I knew game development was the life for me.  Scraping together a few hours a week after my day job isn't satisfying me, I'd like to start taking my game making hobby more seriously.  To that end, I'm going to force myself to polish, finish, and release a game this year.

Being able to move the player in edit mode is more confusing than anything, it's not really any more useful here than it would have been for the previous platforming challenges.

The enemies only show up when you load from a level string: if you just add them from the editor they don't appear in play mode.

Here's my attempt. Not sure it does a great job at teaching anything, more it just has puzzles that use the mechanics one by one.

I didn't realize that shots wrapped until I played this, so I guess your level does a good job of teaching mechanics.

I couldn't figure out exactly what the red blocks did, so I just tried to use them to draw attention to things

http://jonathanwhiting.com/coding/ldw/04teaching.swf?level=QoQAIALHHHHHHHHHDIAIBIHHHHHHHHHCIBIAgIHHHHHHHHHBIFIHHHHHHHHHBIBICIHHHHHHHHHBQBIBJHHHHHHHHHDYICIHHHHHHHHHDYICIHHHHHHHHHAIBYICIHHHHHHHHHBIAYICIHHHHHHHHHBIBICIHHHHHHHHHBIAIBIAIHHHHHHHHHBIAICYIHHHHHHHHHA4IAIAIAoQHHHHHHHHHKAIAISHHHHHHHHH

I tried to make mine as tight as possible, and cram the whole curve into one level.

- Level Only

0 - First Steps
1 - Confidence
2 - Crime and Punishment

Tried to stay away from anything I considered "hard" until the end, and just went for "fun", simple levels. I think I got the curve fairly good.
I did like that checkpoints could be used for an incentive, but didn't really pursue that much.

I liked how the second level really felt like a natural progression of the first one.  When you put them side by side, you can see how the second adds consequences to failure and tests exactly what you learned in the first.

The third one was a really jarring change though.