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[Jon]

Update 18 Mar 2017: One year on, working on PS4 and Vita versions!

>>> Update 28 Feb 2016: Done! Pushed it out to the Steam store!

>>> Update 29 Jan 2016: Releasing in a month's time! Steam store page set up!

>>> Update 13 Nov 2015: Going to GameStart 2015

>>> Update 19 Sep 2015: New demo on Game Jolt

>>> Update 27 Aug 2015: Spacejacked won the Best Linux Game prize at the Intel Level Up 2015 Contest!

>>> Update 22 April 2015: Spacejacked has been Greenlit!

>>> Update 28 Feb 2015: Spacejacked is on Greenlight!  http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=398146007

>>> Update: pre-alpha demo v0.2 at http://www.indiedb.com/games/spacejacked/downloads


Hello! My team and I at Rotten Mage have been working on a game for the past few months, and we decided to create a devlog to motivate ourselves as well as get feedback. We present to you:

Spacejacked

Build. Shoot. Survive.
Spacejacked is a side-scrolling tower-defence cum multi-arena shooter where a lone engineer must protect his spaceship from hordes of alien scum.

The game
Spacejacked takes place aboard a spaceship in a dangerous part of the cosmos. When an alien army attacks, it is up to Dave, the sole engineer, to defend the ship. The game is a blend of side-scrolling tower-defence and arcade shooter, and features multiple arenas. You control Dave, and teleport between arenas while blasting aliens who stand in your way. The arenas can be attacked simultaneously, so you'll have to build turrets to defend them.

The game is built in Haxe with HaxeFlixel. We plan to release a web version of the game in a few months' time as promotional material, then release the full game for PC/Mac/Linux.


Screenies

Our development story so far
We've been working on Spacejacked for almost 6 months now. Spacejacked stemmed from our failed attempt at creating a metroidvania (what were we thinking?!) So we scrapped the game that we had been working on for 6 months, and started again almost from scratch.

The initial prototype took less than 1 month to develop. Since then, we've been polishing the mechanic and testing it out with people. We've simplified lots of stuff (e.g. controls are now the directional keys, an interact button, and a fire button, where previously we had a few more auxiliary buttons), and smoothed out the learning curve.


Things to be done

• Balance the game
• Get some music
• Polish!

A few playtesters have expressed interest in a multiplayer version of the game. We think it's a great idea, but we'll have to see if there's enough demand for that before we add local multiplayer (bad coding practices => hard time adding features T___T ).


Expect to see updates on a weekly basis! Or follow us on Twitter: @RottenMage.
Until next time,
Jon
Rotten Mage

Spacejacked: http://spacejacked.rottenmage.com/

[Julien]

I like the graphics !

[louiscroquet]

I like the idea of a tower defense in arenas like that. I hope the turrets and shit will help you but not too much and shooting will be the main weapon of the game With lots of enemies it can be very fun.

[Jon]

Project Midpoint Retrospective
(Adapted from my teammate chinykian's blog post at http://chinykian.blogspot.com/2014/10/project-midpoint-retrospective.html. Lots of GIFs ahead.)

October 2013 - April 2014
For six months, we worked on a metroidvania titled 'Blue Giant'. Finally realizing that we did not have the resources and proper plans for such an ambitious project, we decided to halt development in April 2014.

23 April 2014
We finalized a new game idea with a smaller scope (but it still turned out to be pretty ambitious). It would be a tower defence arena shooter hybrid. We switched from developing in ActionScript 3 to Haxe, and came up with the basic controls for character navigation on day 1:

May 2014
We continued working on the controls over the next 2 weeks:

Our artist, Victoria, drew some detailed artwork for the new game.

This turned out to be unsustainable, though. Victoria was our only artist, and the workload soon overwhelmed her. We then switched to a style where chinykian could help her with the animation and some of the artwork. chinykian drew the following mockup (which was picked up by Indie Statik for one their #screenshotsaturday features):

Victoria adapted to the new art style, and we eventually managed to build a (barely playable) prototype to show at Casual Connect Asia 2014. We also decided on a name change, and the game was renamed 'Spacejacked'.

Of course, the game was also rife with bugs:

June 2014 - present
We have been hard at work refining the controls and UI...

...adding more types of alien scum...

...adding a 3rd arena...

...and constantly polishing the game.

There, 5 and a half months of struggle and excitement in a few paragraphs and images. We're only halfway done, though. Back to work!

Until next time,
Jon

[Jon]

Progress Update

Here's a short lo-res gif of the gameplay now:

Creating the waves has been tedious work, involving staring at pure XML all day long. We're thinking of ways to improve the process, possibly using the Flash editor to visualize the waves and export them.

Balancing the waves is also another difficult problem. Currently, players accumulate too much metal towards the end of the game, thus making the game too easy at the end. We're thinking of changing the blaster to have limited energy and introducing energy cells as item drops to fix this problem.

[Thomas_]

As a tower defense player, I like your idea.
It looks very nice and fast paced btw.

I hope the turrets and shit will help you but not too much and shooting will be the main weapon of the game

On the contrary, I hope towers will have a real importance. :D

[Jon]

As a tower defense player, I like your idea.
It looks very nice and fast paced btw.

Thanks!

I hope the turrets and shit will help you but not too much and shooting will be the main weapon of the game

On the contrary, I hope towers will have a real importance. :D

Yeah, we're trying to give towers a more important role. It's really difficult to balance them, though. Any suggestions would be welcome!

[Thomas_]

I understand, balance is always uneasy to reach (but so important).
The best way imo is to play and play again until you feel it's right hehe
Do you plan a public demo?

[Jon]

Do you plan a public demo?

Yep, we're planning to release a public demo, but not so soon. We want to fix up some of the more serious issues in the game before letting people play it. Expect to see a web demo before the end of the year.

[Thomas_]

Expect to see a web demo before the end of the year.

I'm really glad to read this!

[Jon]

Progress Update

We did some balancing of the game over the last few days, and touched up the tutorial.

Even though we're still far from being done, we submitted Spacejacked to the IGF, as we had set it as a milestone early on in our development. Here's hoping for the best!

[Leon Fook]

So it's an arena defense with multiple arena to take care. My body is ready.

[Derqs]

Posting to follow.
Looks really fun so far!

[Jon]

Progress Update

Gah! I've gotta be more disciplined in posting regularly on the devlog.

Firstly, thanks to all the people who've posted compliments. Your kind words are really encouraging.
On to the updates: we've been rebalancing the game and polishing up the little details.

We added smoke around the terminals when they are low in health.

We're trying to balance the game more by making the terminal repairs use up metal as well.

Finally, we added more feedback during turret upgrades.

Tasks for the next few weeks:
Work on a cutscene system, and put some awesome cutscenes in the game!

[MikeStar]

Wow! I really like te art! I think you had a great evolution from the first images.
By the way, how do you make this awesome gifs? I've tried everything and I can't make them look as great as yours?
Thanks and congratulations for your work!

[Jon]

Wow! I really like te art! I think you had a great evolution from the first images.
By the way, how do you make this awesome gifs? I've tried everything and I can't make them look as great as yours?
Thanks and congratulations for your work!

Thanks!
We use GifCam to do the gifs.

[sidbarnhoorn]

Awesome! :D

[Jon]

Progress Update

Victoria, our artist, did a wonderful poster for us!

Check out her other work at http://vickychastan.wix.com/vickiebelieve.

Not much progress on the cutscene system so far. Instead, we added some minor touches to Dave's animation, showing him ordering the drone to fire.

It's exam week for me, so the next update might take a while.

[Jon]

Progress Update

Whew! Exams are finally over. Didn't get much done in the past few weeks.

We took a break from the development of Spacejacked to participate in the Ludum Dare 31 jam.
The result?

H.T.P

Please check it out and give us some comments over there if you have the time!

[Jon]

Progress Update

Added some music since the last build, and tweaked the sound effects a bit. I'll still need to add more sound effects and tweak the volumes more. Oh, and still nothing done on the cutscene system 

Uploaded our pre-alpha demo v0.1 for Windows, OS X and Linux to IndieDB: http://www.indiedb.com/games/spacejacked/downloads!
Probably gonna release a new pre-alpha demo each week.

Please try out the demo and leave your comments here :D
I would love to hear your thoughts on the gameplay, graphics, audio and bugs!