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[ITS_Mike]

Coins are finally working!

Last Thursday I ran into a bit of a problem where coins would be attracted to you just fine, but would enter into orbit around your plane in certain situations.  I tried using the Seek Steering Behavior and while it did fix the orbiting problem, the coins had too much momentum and would swing around the player before finally hitting him.  I eventually solved the problem by setting the coin's velocity directly rather than using forces.  I would like to get it working with forces, but this will work well enough


Gamedev Livestream

I will once again be live streaming the game's development today!  I will be working on adding in a coins counter and making it so that collecting coins gives you extra lives.  I plan on streaming from now till 5:00PM PST, with an hour break for lunch at 12:00PM PST.  Hope to see you there

Twitch.tv Live Stream

[ITS_Mike]

After getting the coins and their counter implemented, I started adding in a new enemy type: The battleship!  I needed to implement high/low priority sprites in order to make them appear below the clouds, which wasn't too bad, but as the additional feature list kept growing (they are not simple to implement unfortunately) I decided it would be best to scrap them.  We (the development team and investor) may decide to add them in later, but for right now they are on the cutting room floor.

I made the clouds partially transparent, on the suggestion of @Uhfgood on Twitter, and I think it turned out quite well!  I used dithering, since the old arcade/console hardware doesn't seem to have supported alpha blending.  Normally, GreyKnight (the artist) and myself are not really big fans of dithering, since it tends to looks quite ugly.  However, dithering was developed for CRT displays (since those were pretty much the only display type at the time) and when used in a game with a CRT shader, it actually doesn't look too bad.  But that's my opinion   See the screenshot below for yourself


I will admit though that it looks slightly better in motion.


Gamedev Livestream

Sorry for the lack of a livestream yesterday   I plan on streaming today though!  From now till 12:00PM PST, and possibly another stream aftwards   I'll be working on the weapon upgrade system, so it should be fun!

Twitch.tv Live Stream

[goob256]

I think that translucency/dithering looks great with that shader! Too bad about battleships, but you have to set your priorities.

[ITS_Mike]

Well, a lot has happened since I last posted a devlog entry.


The Big Break

First off though, we took a multi-month break from the project, since we seemed to be spinning our wheels.  Coming back to it with a fresh perspective however, we decided to drop the CRT effect: It would have made distribution a bit more difficult (due to Stage3D), and the minimum requirements to run the game were noticeably increased, which is never something you want with an AS3 game.

We eventually decided to go back to a version of the game before we added the CRT effect and just release the darn thing This project was always intended to be a small, fun game and I think the results meet the requirements.


Released on Kongregate

Oh!  Which reminds me:  The game is available to play over on Kongregate!  The link is here: http://www.kongregate.com/games/IfThenSoftware/haukr  Which brings up one more thing: We finally decided on a name for the game.  It is called "Haukr", meaning Hawk in Old Norse.


What Now?

We recently entered a month-long game jam for April called the 64Digits Spring Competition.  Our entry for it, named Akarn, has been developed almost entirely on the livestream over at http://www.twitch.tv/invisibleman6 (you can watch recordings over there as well).  Akarn is almost ready to be released as well, so stay tuned!

My brother and I also have plans on entering into this weekend's Ludum Dare 29 which should be a lot of fun