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[Carlos224]

Hi, welcome to the dev blog for Sim space.
COme and join my on my quest to make the smartest enemies ever!

Sim space is a Top-down tactical shooter for Android. Instead of wading through thousands weak enemies you'll be pitted against a single enemy who has access to the same equipment and upgrades.  

This game is currently in development and is about 20% done.
There is currently an alpha version available here http://www.indiedb.com/games/sim-space-combat/downloads/simspacealpha2

[Carlos224]

I have now got an Audio engineer on board for the game, so it will sound sweet! I'm looking at possible ways to get some artists / modelers involved to make the game look sweet too!
Work on game play has stalled a little bit as I'm trying to make the perfect controls for the game before I design more game play. The controls will affect the movement which will affect the game play - or at least that's how I figure it is.

[Carlos224]

Last week I spent time working on the UI. I bought some assets from the Unity app store. The UI is vastly improved.
I'll quickly share a thought I had about the asset store: is it is a great way for game designers to get game systems or libraries so they don't have to do the coding - but you won't see that it's some stock code in the game.
Round the other way, as a coder I need to buy art assets and you'll be able to see which one's I got from the store. Worse there may be another game using the same assets! There is not nearly enough variety of art assets available - So I would recommend making stuff for the Unity store if your an artist there is good money to be made there.

Back to the game at hand...I spent a bit of time trying to make the lobby a bit more entertaining than being a flat screen.
I added particle effects that move past the camera and set the camera to rotate inside a 3d scene. I added emissive components to some UI panels so there's a little bit of visual flare from the UI. At the moment I think it looks quite cool.
I would like to add a few ships in the background too (just flying into the distance) but that is a bit overkill for now.
I did like the affect in SPAZ with ships happily battling away on the main menu. If you haven't played SPAZ and your a fan of space games go and play it now!

Next week I'll be working on Core Miner for EGX Rezzed, so there won't be a diary update, but the week after that I'll be adding the game mode quests and game stats.

[Carlos224]

Another week gone by. I got less done than I had hoped, but I'm happy with I have created. I made a daily quest system - very neatly implemented so it's easy to debug / find problems. The thing I realized as well is that is effectively an achievement system too. So I'll be doing a little more tweaking on it next week.




The idea behind a daily quest ("challenges" in this game) is that for my arena based game play it gives something a little bit different to do each time you play - and perhaps push the player into trying out differing strategies. The daily quests will also give a small reward for completing it. I think I better start adding unlock-ables.

[Carlos224]

A few weeks on from my last post....what have I been getting up to? Well...I have been doing "back-end" stuff, so the game play / visuals of he  game has not changed much. I have finished my Daily quest system and made an achievement system complete with a few beta achievements. I have stuck in the shop, to unlock new ships and guns. Lastly I put in the most important bit in the middle, which was the save system.
Last week I was meant to be getting Google Analytics in the game, along with some easy ways for people to send me feedback. I got an Android Native plugin for Unity, so I can do native calls to the Android sdk / analytic SDK in c#, but so far the plugin has not worked for me and I'm waiting on some responses from the developer on what has gone wrong. So in the mean time I got on with a fun task.
I made some ships!


My next steps will be to balance the rate at which players unlock items, and to release an alpha version to get feedback.