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[indiehacker]

 Hey guys this is my love letter to games like Dodonpachi, Ikaruga, and Galaga. It's still very early in development, but I wanted to document my entire process. So i'm kicking off my devlog now that I have at least a little something to show!

I am working with an artist for this game and have a few pixels to show off. The pixel artist is a gentlemen from Greece who does amazing work. I'm currently in the prototyping phase and building out all the first level enemies, bosses, and the first player. My goal is to be able to self fund the first level and then kickstart or something from there to really finish it and to be able to afford to build the game the way I really would like to.

Here is a short video of the movement prototype i'm working on.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ylmurQaPPkg

[Fat Pug Studio]

Very nice sprite, i like that roll in game

[indiehacker]

Very nice sprite, i like that roll in game

thanks! i think it came out great.. I think it will add for some interesting game play as well.. working on the weapons system now and am on vacation from work until the new year so should be able to make some good progress .  I'm funding the art through my development companies profits, so it's going to be slow going.. as I can afford more art I'll cough up for it!

I came to the decision though if I ever wanted to finish a game that i'm proud of i had to hire an artist and musician/sfx to work w/ me.

I can program almost anything, but I can't pixel to save my life.. Spyros does great work and happy to have him work w/ me on this project.

[Fat Pug Studio]

Same here, you have to give something to get it back. Does this guy have some more of his works we can see somewhere?

[indiehacker]

Same here, you have to give something to get it back. Does this guy have some more of his works we can see somewhere?

here is a link http://pixelation.org/index.php?topic=17389.0

[Fat Pug Studio]

Wow, he delivers some nice art indeed

I found a guy for my stuff on Pixelation too, Lighterthief. Great forum.

[indiehacker]

Update 2:

Today I have been working on probably the most important aspect of a bullet hell game.. bullet patterns and how I plan to make it very easy to create any kind of pattern.. The plan is to allow you to have any number of bullet arrays that can be adjusted and spaced on angles.. each array can have customizable bullet numbers, rotation, speed, etc.  It's coming along ok at the moment, but I spent a lot of time just planning things out today. I should have something to show off very soon!

After that I'm going to work on the first player ships weapons. The plan is to have 3 or 4 different ships to choose from with their own unique weapons.  The player will be able to pick up random drops through out each level(kind of dungeon crawler esque) which mutates and transforms their weapon systems through various alien technologies.

[Fat Pug Studio]

What engine are you working in? If you're using unity there are a lot of cheap assets to save yourself a lot of time.

[indiehacker]

What engine are you working in? If you're using unity there are a lot of cheap assets to save yourself a lot of time.

I don't really use assets.. I find most of the code extremely unpalatable and not usually happy with how they work. I won't even entertain using visual assets. I want to have original work.  I took a look at a couple for ideas. I've been burned by to many deprecated assets.  Then I have to maintain it. I'd rather just build my own pattern generator. Part learning exercise, partly because I am pretty confident I can build a better generator than those available and if the game flops I can at least sell my assets I am the owner of my own one man development company and am funding this project through my company so anything I can recoup off it is going to be aok with me. Any further exposure to help drive business to my dev company is also good.

I use LeanTween and Rewind and that's about it.  Development is what I do. If i just use assets, I won't be satisfied and I like to have complete control over my codebase.

I am building this in the latest Unity 5.5.. I must say it's a nice improvement over previous versions.  C# is also a fun language.

[Fat Pug Studio]

Oh, f you're proficient in coding, the why not

[indiehacker]

Oh, f you're proficient in coding, the why not

20 years of practice Many many languages.. Learned 2 this year.. I try to learn at least 1 a year.. i don't usually do 2, but I picked up Elixir/Erlang and ReactJS this year.