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[c0dej0ckey]

Solar Strike is a sci-fi themed 2D Tower Defense roguelike.



We are just two guys (one programmer and one artist), wanting to bring the
roguelike style to a 2D Tower Defense game.

This game has been in progress for the past year part time, and its time
we start to show the world what we are making.

Here are a few screens (all with placeholder art):




The game still needs tons of polish, but we are slowly getting there. If you are an artist and are looking for a game project to work on, feel free to message me. We could use some extra help to keep this moving forward

I plan to release the source code as I create it, so that anyone interested can follow along.

[c0dej0ckey]

This week I implemented a Damage Add-On upgrade.

How this is supposed to work is:

If you put it near your towers, any tower that is within range of it will get a damage boost.
If you put more than one add on near a tower, that tower will get a multiplied increase.

For right now, the art is just a yellow orb, but that will change soon enough.

Here is a sample:

[c0dej0ckey]

This week, I have done a bunch of different work on my game.

I added the green outline showing the tower's Field of view. In order to do this, I had to write a shader so it can dynamically resize whenever the tower's field of view changes.

This was my first shader ever, and im so happy to have written one.

The next thing I added was a Range Booster. If you put this near your tower, itll boost any tower's FOV that is in vicinity of it.

I also added a cooldown bar. After every shot a blue bar fills up and gives you visual feedback when the next shot is ready to fire.

You can see all these things here:

[c0dej0ckey]

This week Ive implemented a whole bunch of new things:

* Resized tiles from 32x32 to 64x64.
* Added a cool down component, which puts the tower down for a state of time to recharge.
* Added a new ammo component, so the towers have a finite amount of ammo they can shoot before they have to cool down.
* Added parallax
* Resized the playable area so that it only takes up a portion of the screen
* Added a shield generator, which allows the tower to take less damage when an enemy comes near it
* Added a cooldown addon, which the cooldown time to be less if a tower is in it's vicinity

Here are some of the snapshots of this week:

[c0dej0ckey]

This week, I rewrote the tower selection menu and how the tower building work flow is going to work.

* Add a new slide in panel which allows you to select new tower/undo last move/cancel operation/confirm towers to be built
* Added a slightly transparent tower selection menu whenever you select the "Select New" or "Build"

[c0dej0ckey]

This Week I did a ton of work on UI mockups and I added some new towers in to the game.

Here are a couple of the mockups.






All of these are pretty roughly done in Photoshop. I want to redo them in Sketch so that they can be exported to the correct size for iPhones.

Also some art has been done, and a few towers have been added to the game.

[c0dej0ckey]

Still alive!

I was having a lot of problems with my machine the past two weeks. I was updating all my build systems, thinking that it would help me work faster, but instead the new updates made my app undeployable to emulators.

I did manage to get a few things done though:

I implemented a new laser tower in the code:



I also started implementing my new menu re-design:




Also fixed some bugs, and removed code that wasnt being used anymore.

[c0dej0ckey]

This week I made a bunch of new changes:

* I added two different render states - grayscale and transparency when tower is reloading and semi-transparency when tower is placed on the map, but the build has not been confirmed yet.

You can see that here:



The tower on the left is reloading. The tower on the right is "placed", but build is not confirmed yet.

I also added the nuclear tower (with a very, very basic AOE attack):



I also added the info bar, which tells you how much money and what level you are on:



Various other changes:
* fix - panel positions are not reset if new level is loaded
* base is resized to 2x2 tiles

[marcgfx]

seems kind of weird to make the reloading tower go transparent to me. you have the recharge bar already, is that no enough? while looking at the gif, I was first expecting the one on the left to be a building animation, after placing a new turret (where the line at the top would be something like a health bar).

[c0dej0ckey]

fair point. I will look into that further. Thanks for the feedback!

[c0dej0ckey]

This week I added a few new features:

* added a rocket tower with a placeholder rocket for now
* redid the pause and settings button
* various other bug fixes

[c0dej0ckey]

This week I implemented quite a few things:

* Implemented the Refinery Add-on. (The anvil looking thing in the picture below). If you place this add on near a refinery, itll give you an extra few minerals per second.
* Added the Shield Generator animations (the building with the satellite dish on top of it)
* Added the updated barricade image
* Added the update range booster add-on animation
* Changed the path-finding for the units to be less predictable.
* The units will now destroy towers/addons/etc if they walk in to them.
* If a tower is built while a Unit is below it, the tower will crush the unit.
* Added a start menu panel that is mostly empty
* The Field of View Shader can now only be seen when the tower or add on is clicked on. The Field of View basically tells the user how far the tower can see. In the future, I want to be able to show different types of things when you click on an addon or tower, such as what other add-ons are affecting a tower, its field of view, health, etc.

[c0dej0ckey]

Been a busy couple of weeks.

The past two weeks, Ive done a few things:

* refactored some of the add-on code to make it more "flexible"
* allowed the addons, shield generator, barricades to be collideable
* created some new selection boxes (which im not sure I like yet)
* bug fixes

Here are some of the selection boxes below:



I also spent a crap ton of time trying to get the description panel correct. This will be an area on the menu that
describes the tower's abilities.

Here are some first trials......




^^ *shudders* those are pretty terrible.

I decided that the current design I had in mind isnt gonna work for as I thought

I spent some time doing a few redesigns.



I think I like this one the most. I think this is going to be the color scheme I stick with
for the rest of the project.

[c0dej0ckey]

Still alive...again!

Ive been spending the past two-three months doing some UI overhaul on the game.

I went through a few UI iterations that I will showcase below:

I generally stuck with the style I had come up with in December, but altered a few of the different UI panels.

The initial Set:







The new set!:

These will still continue to change as I get more art assets: (build list and tower panel stayed the same)





I find the new stuff to look just a little bit cleaner.

Im pretty much done with the UI now. Going to more my progress to 40%!