This is definitely an interesting project, I'm curious to see what your designer comes up with the for the other characters.

Neat mechanics, this seems like a well built topdown shooter, which says a lot as the genre tends to be fodder for early GM users

The game aert went from "passable" to "ohmygodthisissoatmosphericwhatisgoingonIdon'teven-"

Good show!

So are those characters going to be flying bosses or somesuch?

[New features:]

Entry 6:
2 MAGIC! 2 MAGIC, 2 MAGIC, 2 MAGIC!


I added text indicating damage every time you get a hit. CLOUD MISSED! 

Kidding, all the hit detection still uses no dicerolls, nor do I intend it to.

ALSO HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME 

NEW DEMO!

New features:
-Functioning shop. Use the arrow keys to navigate and Q to pick up/drop a selected item.
-Available shop areas: inventiry, sales floor, weapons screen
-Buy and sell items by picking up items in the shop and dropping them in your inventory/hardpoints.
-Visual hardpoint mockup in the shop. Place weapons in hardpoint slots to equip them.
-"improved" camera shake.
-Player thruster effects using attached particles.
-Flashy shiny damage text when you hit something.

Shop is fairly buggy. I'd appreciate it if you guys broke the @#%$ out of it and reported how you did it. The more incorrect ways I find to use the UI now the better.

Up Next: Up-Grades!
I've finished most of the shop functionality, but I still need to handle a slightly different variant from items, Ships. The ships will trade-in for full value like the other items, but only when you select/buy a new one instead of going to cargo (for obvious reasons, Spaceship of Holding? I think not!)
I've worked ou the logic for a grid-based upgrade tree that will start with a bunch of mario ships (they do everything) and branch into specialties. I have about 4 tiers of upgrades worked out now. Each member of the previous tier has 1-3 different upgrades avaiulable, some of which are shared merges of different branches.
I'll post those in the next entry.

Also, for those curious, the hardpoints are handled by an invisible tab in the player's inventory. Currently this means you can't have a ship with less cargo than it has hardpoints, but because I was never a fan of the UE Fighter in EVO this won't be a big deal. N o minmaxing, I says!

Looking good! You could go a bit less heavy on the generic particle effects (I use scaled, rotating and variably fading sprites myself.) But you've got some good mechanics to develop, so I'll definitely keep an eye on this. Good luck!

[The Salvage Sound Diaries: Week 6. Choirs In Conway Mill]

Also a tiny update to the sound diaries!

The Salvage Sound Diaries: Week 6. Choirs In Conway Mill
http://www.hyperduck.co.uk/?p=1853

Seem's like someone's gettin' their Steve Roach on!

[Writers Plagiarize, Artists Steal]

Entry 5:
Mockup Mania

I've been doing a lot of meditating on the kind of threats I want the player to face in a playthrough and how they will face them.



I'm currently planning to have a kind of stage progression system. I'm hoping to keep it transparent (ie: the player knows when they hit a new stage) so the player can more organically understand what leads to stage advancement and how to avoid or encourage it.

The dichotomy is between running or digging in. Running allows you to avoid conflict and I'm trying to make that viable. However, you will also be unable to effectively mine or stop for fuel while on the run.

Staying in one place progresses stages while running reverses progress. In practice I hope this will lead to the player using a combination of fighting and running to defend themselves while they mine and to avoid an unwinnable fight respectively. Failing to stand your ground could mean you run out of fuel, health or resources while failing to run could find you surrounded and overwhelmed.

Writers Plagiarize, Artists Steal

With the three resources, podlike starting ship and free-roaming controls, it's no secret I'm a big Starscape fan. Also note the GTA comment (if you can read my chickenscratch writing) in the alleged mockup. A wise wiki once said "Tropes Are Not Bad" similarly, using existing mechanics is pretty common these days.  I just hope to combine them in a way that's not been done before.

Each map will be pretty big, but nothing like an endless sprawling world, so having a kind of HQ between sorties will help tie them together in a way that feels natural.  I'm also thinking about game events which will only take place when you return to your cabin, so that it will have a distinct feeling in how the player thinks about the game mechanics.

It would be really cool to make a game that's fully about archaeology in a science fiction context.  It's the sort of thing that to do properly I think one would want to team up with a really talented writer.  I'd like to see something with the integrity of a classic 90s adventure game but with a much more action-based freeform interaction.

Yeah I hope you can make this game, this certainly has that kind of attitude in my opinion.

Also; the out-of-mission event trigger sort of reminds me of Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, how windows would pop up like "For some reason all of the towels in your ship have gone missing."

I could not get through that entire video.

Why? Because it was so bleeding hilarious! Jumping on guards and slapping hhem like a ninny? Confused guards trying a rewired lightswitch to no avail? Smacking a guard in the face with a door he himself opened? This is brilliantly bizzare and I love it!

I'm not sure if you still need any animations or spriting work, but I could possibly help you out.

See my portfolio here.

Keep up the great work man. This is great already.

[Shops and docking]

Entry 4:
Traffic Control



NEW DEMO!

NEW FEATURES:
-You can dock with passing tradeships. match speeds and face in the same direction as the ship to dock. Press ENTER to exit. Ironic keybind, I know.
-Your ship refuels while docked.
-Use your weapons (Q key for now) to blow up asteroids.
-Fly over bits of destroyed ore (the colorful shards) to pick them up.
-Navpoints. Tradeships are dynamically spawned. Fly toward the navpoint to spawn the ship.

Shops and docking
I'm excited because I just got a crapton of hard stuff done. I'm only a few short steps from adding upgradable ships. I'm using variables in the UI controller to pull current ship info. Then, when I despawn the ship while docked, I can manipulate the UI data and load it back into a newly spawned ship.
That's all the hard stuff I had to do to allow a changeable player ship. All I need to do now is make the UI functional and start handling currency, which is my next step.
The shop UI is going to appear on the right as an opposite to the player ship UI, which should keep things clearer than if I just extended the ship UI.

Next up: ore banking/resource gathering pt. 2
I'm planning to add the next stage of resource gathering. When you dock, your ores will automatically be removed from cargo and deposited in the tradeship. That will mean tracking the player's wealth, likely via more controller variables in the UI. I may consider fissioning off a data controller for clenliness' sake and clarity.
After that I'm going to start experimenting with buying and selling goods. I have some ideas on how I want to handle that. Isntead of commodity spreadsheet I'm thinking about making a row-matching setup. I'm hoping the player will want to carry around a bunch of goods they may or may not need in the hope of finding a row to match, which will equate roughly to a good market break.
It's just theoretical at the moment so don't make fun of me

Why don't you make it a game about collecting 'somethings'? "Congratulations! You've accquired the red powerup that makes the red stuff in front of the door go away! Have fun backtracking."

I'm not actually that critical about metroidvania games, but my inner strickster cackles with glee at the idea of seeing the genre lampooned.

[Entry 3:]

Entry 3:
Space is Full of People Selling Random Stuff for a Dollar

(Left: first design for a merchant cycler ship.)

Merchants
Banker-traders are your source of equipment and ships. They have an onboard warehouse of goods that they sell when one of the hubs they pass is low and they can make a profit. On the side, they deal with freebooters like the player. They'll also take aboard your resources and give you credit on any other merchant ship. (Think of it like a chain of banks in which you have a savings account.)
These massive ships would be very painful to render at full scale, so I'm going to be cheating with a bit of 3d. The reason the graphic is so small is because I'll be rendering it with a fraction of the camera's scroll speed. As such, it will be a distant ob ject which you'll shrink down into (ie: you are flying into the distance.)

Cycler ships
What's a cycler ship? Sounds like a washing machine turned into a boat.
A cycler ship is a type of large stellar or interstellar ship that's inserted into a comet-like orbit that passes close, then swings far away from the parent star.
By having a large number of such ships on a rosette of orbits, we can have a huge, moving conveyor of starships in safe orbits that rotate between destination and origin.

This site has some good explanatory graphics.

Theoretically we could just fly spacestations into those orbits with functioning biospheres or habitats, then speed up anything we want to send along. It's especially useful with crew, because we don't have to speed up and slow down life support for the entire journey.
The system in which Hunt*Evade takes place is a young one, full of rich planetecimal debris ripe for mining and easy to reach. There are a number of industrial clans exploiting these resources and providing transit for them via cycler ships.

Dynamic Events
Last night, I got navigation points and spawnable objects working. Right now, my test event is a motherlode asteroid about twice the size of a normal rock. It takes a few hundred milliseconds to load during which the game hangs. As such I think I need to A) clean up my asteroid building pipeline and B) make the asteroid smaller. I'm tempted to do a cascading spawner that just spirals out form the center adding blocks every step until it runs out (smaller asteroids will have less blocks.)
My next goal though is to start spawning merchant ships this way. Essentially, a point will pop up randomly in the distance with an appropriate label and a limited time. If the player gets to the point, it will spawn a merchant ship, travelling across the belt. If the player matches speed over the navpoint, they'll dock, offload their ore and eventually be able to brows items, ships and weapons.

Cool, so is there some kind of word-building mechanic, I see all the objects have one-syllable names.

Big up to all the owl bois! Mash that fly button.   

Looking forward to this game. I've resolved not to buy any more games this year unless there's another humble indie bundle or this comes out. Maybe you can wait until AFTER my calculus finals? 

Good luck, D-pad!

I'll mess around with the collisions and see if that makes things feel better. I'm trying to keep the UI as clean as possible; what if I added some sort of particles behind the player's fist when they're punching at the right speed? do you think that would help?

It could, I just have no feel for the actual hit area, and the game's tolerance for messing that up is 0 (you die from one hit.) Have you thought about giving the player 4 or 5 hits before they die? Maybe having them get knocked back every time they get hit?