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[sleeper_service]

Fly the best jet in the galaxy and demilitarize planets by blowing up their entire combined armed forces,-
in front of a never-ending nova sunset.





Juicy Combat
Out-boost your enemies, use gravity to your advantage and hyperspace-dodge through projectiles and structures when things get too hairy.





Loot
Make your jet stronger and stranger by gathering some of the 100+ available passive and active items. Use tons of different weapons against your opponent, including aerial melee options.





Opposition
Engage various air and ground enemies in fierce 2d combat. Confront distinct bosses for each zone or even try surviving beyond that in endless play.[/color]







HDog passed greenlight! Thanks to everyone who voted!

Tons of gifs:





















More actives, 2nd Boss

Vlog #8 ( Week 16 )
Tutorial simulation, even more items

Vlog #7 ( Week 13 )
First boss, full options menu.

Vlog #6 ( Week 11 )
Added more passive and active items, as well as new melee weapons.

Vlog #5 ( Week 10 )
Added enemy waves, enemy spawning behavior, intermission scene and item chests.

Dev Vlog #4 ( Week 8 )
Added passive and active items, as well as the supporting ui.

Dev Vlog #3 ( Week 7 )
Added lots different ship guns and the supporting ui.

Dev Vlog #2 ( Week 5 )
Implemented additional enemy types.

Dev Vlog #1 ( Week 4 )
Basic air combat and jet behavior.

Trashsite - Twitter - Project Trello

[Superb Joe]

rip jet engine nights https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=4715.0 and best of luck to you my friend

[sleeper_service]

Oh wow, that thing looked amazing, love what they did with the cloud cover.

[ｂ∀ ｋｋｕｓａ]

good luck on reaching the level of SKYCHASERS

[sleeper_service]

Challenge accepted, I guess.

[sleeper_service]

Added a whole batch of sunsets to dogfight in front of.


New Flak-Mech enemy:


Now back to working on fourth enemy type.

[sleeper_service]

Vlog #2 (Week 5)
(Prototype, everything you see here is subject to change) Hyperspace Dogfights after five weeks of gamedev. This week I concentrated on different enemy types and mechanics to support them. This layed the groundwork for later enemies and boss fights.

I added a ground-based Flak-Mech enemy that shoots at you from long range and denies areas with its unaimed scatter shots. I also added a two-turret Gunship that can fire in all directions. It is most dangerous when approached directly from the front or from behind, since you are in range of both its turrets then. Both these enemies are made up of components that can be targeted and damaged individually. The Flak Mech's head has less hp than its base for example, the gunship can be disarmed by targeting its turrets and it will take additional damage if you target its engine section in the middle. Both enemies are still work in progress, the gunship especially, its pathfinding still needs work and I also want it to do evasive jump when taking damage.

At the end of the week I started to work on homing missiles. Each missile follow its own targeting marker, which in return moves towards the closest targetable object. For hostile missiles this will usually be the player, but I wanted to work in tracking of multiple targets from the get go, so I added some placeholder flares that the player can drop. They distract missiles as expected. All still very WIP, they missiles can't collide with the player yet and eventually you'll be able to shoot them down as well. The flares will most likely become the first active item I'll add in.

Player homing missiles will work in similar ways, but I hope to make them a little smarter, they will lock on to one enemy or enemy component each.

Performance is also an issue I need to tackle, it drops quite a bit when recording. I hope to get that fixed soonish. Next week I will clean up left-over stuff and then focus on the framework for selectable player weapons.

[sleeper_service]

Hyperspace Dogfights after seven weeks of gamedev. Week five was largely lost due to problems with the engine. After doing some general cleanup related to the new enemy types I mostly dealt with new ship weapons and the related UI during last week .

The game now has a framework that allows to select from any amount of weapons the player has acquired. Each weapon is treated as a unique object, with its own set of stats. This allows to assign random loot prefixes to weapons, making each weapon a little different whenever you find them. The game also already supports randomized weapon names, another thing I plan to implement for most gear in order to make it more unique across different runs. Right now I do not plan to make weapons appear directly on the player ship, so I figured I put some animation work into their UI icons to show how they work and behave.

I focused on direct fire kinetic weapons first and implemented single shot weapons alongside automatic guns and weapons that fire multiple projectiles per shot. In the current concept you’ll have unlimited ammo, but there will be a reload mechanic. Along with the new weapons came a lot new stats as well: Fire mode, random damage, accuracy when boosting, accuracy when falling, recoil force, shoot speed sway, projectile speed drop and more. All of this can eventually be affected by passive items you’ll gather. The selected weapon also affects how your recticles look and position themselves. The overall style of the reticle will be configurable, currently there are 7 designs to choose from.

At the end of the week I implemented the a first melee weapon. The sword still needs some optimization, especially in regards to how it deals damage. But overall I like how it turned out so far. It has a three hit combo, with each strike having different reach and base damage. Most melee weapons will have combos and special attacks as well. The sword will get a charged heavy swing eventually. Other melee weapons will have longer or shorter combos and to some extend they will interact with the movement system as well. Some weapons will have your ship leap forward or jump backwards during certain attacks, some combos might require you to combine attacks with timed boosts or hyperspace jumps. Thats the idea at last. For next week I want to focus on the framework for passive and active items first.

[sleeper_service]

This week I focused on passive items, their related UI and the pause menu.

I got a little carried away with spriting those ammo boxes, so these where the first passives I introduced. They all alter your weapon fire in various ways, making shots faster, stronger, weaker, larger and so on. Right now the item have a somewhat weak effect, they'll probably get more noticeable as balancing progresses. Different items will at times impact the same stat, balancing each other out (The rail-fitted ammo on the left increases speed, the heavy shots on the right makes them slower for example). Scatter ammo has probably the most noticeable effect right now.

As I went along with this, I introduced several new stats. Among other things, weapons can now pierce or split projectiles when firing. There is also a basic framework for hit procs, so individual shots can carry special effects with them (black projectiles are death shot procs, destroying non-bosses in one hit).

Since I was working on the ui already I also added the basic framework for active items. Spacebar now launches flares, giving you a way to distract homing shots. Lately the enemies learned how to use those missile batteries from week 5, so that will come in handy.

One day I also sidelined in introduce charged attacks, like the sword cleave. Most meele weapon will either have a charge move, or a special attack executed by combining melee swings with timed boosts or jumps.

A lot of time also went into the pause menu that lets you see what items you gathered. It's not very polished yet, eventually you'll be able to get flavor text on all the items you have in there.

I also fixed a lot of small thing along the way, most noticeably gunships act more proactive now and the weapons sounds are more leveled.

Next week I want to introduce enemy waves and the intermission between them. Thats where you'll be able to pick up all those new items.

[sleeper_service]

The last weeks went into integrating item gathering, game progression and the intermission scene between waves. A lot of other small stuff came with that, like laying the basework for dynamic enemy spawning, difficulty progression and player currency.

The game now creates enemy waves with set goals. Currently the only possible objective is destroying a certain value of enemies, with different enemies awarding points depending on how threatening they are. Down the line there'll be multiple possible wave objectives. You get notified that you have completed the wave through that neato "Go!" Arrow, but you can stick around to destroy some more enemies if you like. Difficulty increase within waves, so the fight will still get harder, but overall difficulty also increases the longer your run lasts, affecting subsequent waves accordingly. So farming a single wave for too long is seldom advisable.

Completing a wave also gives you an item chest. In the current design you'll have to spend some srm (the games currency) in order to unlock those. This system isn't final and might still change a lot, for now the essential thing I wanted to do is integrating a way to gain items as the game progresses.

You can interact with chests and srm drop during waves, but most of the time it'll be easier to end the wave and collect your stuff there. Chests will travel with you to the next wave, so you can still unlock them later. I didn't want item management to interfere with combat itself too much. The whole system opens some possibilities for later. There could be malfunctioning chests hidden in the levels that won't travel with you when you end waves, so you'll have to find and pick them up during battle...

Advancing to the next waves is done by tap-boosting three times in quick succession when facing right. The whole intermission scene still needs a lot of work, but I'm at least somewhat happy with how the jump initialization feels. After a wave is complete you can basically jump away from the battlefield at any time, which even has some tactical use.

The whole intermission design was also implemented to create respite between phases of action. I'm all in for those sweet osculating interest curves. :D But yeah, it all still needs a lot of tuning. Difficulty ramps up too slowly right now and in generally the enemies need to pose a bigger threat overall.

This whole iteration cycle was pretty weird. I felt like I did a lot of bland stuff that didn't really impact the game that much. But after only testing everything individually and then putting it all together yesterday, I kinda freaked out because HDog suddenly felt like, well “a real game”. Like... it has levels now and rewards and progression. Lets see how it goes from here.

Next week I want to flesh out the intermission some more and I want to increasing the item saturation, so that each particular run becomes more unique as you gather different items each time. There are also more weapons in the pipe, mostly melee: A hardlight katana, a medium range lance thing and some kind of light-wire lash.  (Weapons drop in chests by the way, I just didn't get any :D )

[jctwood]

I do like the idea of melee weapons in a dogfighting game. Are you considering a touch interface for mobile or is PC the only the target?

[sleeper_service]

Right now its planned to be PC only. It's made with GDevelop, so an Android port would be possible, but I don't think it would work that well. You'd need quite  a few buttons to control it and I don't think drag and tap controls would be precise enough. Also I have no experience with mobile development anyways, so I'll probably stay away from that.

[sleeper_service]

Join me over the holidays as I unbox various new items for Hyperspace Dogfights. :D Almost all the ammo types are in now, plus various new passives that change other aspects of your ship, apart from how its weapons behave. Some engine stuff, cooldown related things, items that improve your collision damage or size up your melee swings etc.

There are also two new melee weapons, the lance and the katana. The former creates a medium range damage zone and has a charged long range attack, the later deals accumulating damage that is dealt once you end your combo. With the katana you can also do a jump-strike move that always crits, by jumping right after attacking.

There are also a couple new actives, like missiles, air mines and bombs. Their respective mechanics will be used in certain passives as well.

Throughout the week I also implemented a lot of small features, like damage over time effects, explosions that actual deal damage, shot deflection on melee attacks and impact force for all weapons. I also optimized the loading of certain animations (shots and melee), that pretty much fixed all the performance issues the prototype was having.

The item count is still just a fraction of what will be in the final game (the video showcases about half what is currently in), but there are already some neato synergies happening that I didn't plan individually. Rubberized ammo and active bombs give you bouncing bombs. Double jumps allow you to execute multiple jump strikes in a row if you have the katana. As with comparable roguelikes I want the final game to create a large variety of possible play styles, emerging from what items you get. So far its working out nicely. Discovering behaviors I hadn't plan for is great fun.

Have a great time and see you next year, when we'll deal with the first boss of the game.

[Fat Pug Studio]

Nice stuff, reminds me of Galak-Z



The white clouds make it a bit hard to see some things imo.

[sleeper_service]

Oh gawd, Galak-Z, I gotta play that again some time, sweet game!

Clouds definitely need to be reworked to be less obtuse yes. They either be always behind ships and/or get transparent, and/or get a color overhaul.

New Katana weapon in action:

[sleeper_service]

I tried to get the boring stuff out of the way and spent week 13 on refining the pause menu and implementing various options. A couple things are still missing, but overall the game now lets you configure the usual stuff, including key bindings. You can also select the crosshair your ship uses and you can tune or disable parts of the combat feedback stuff. The final game will likely also have resolution options, as well as some more ways to customize the ui.

In the week leading to new years eve I added in the first boss. As shown, it can have various attachments that the player will already be familiar with from other enemies. It also has a hanger in the front from which it spawn the new tier 2 fighters. Those are faster than the previous jets and they fire bursts of small shots.

The boss itself also has three engine attachments. Those have high crit exposure, meaning weapons generally are more likely to deal bonus damage to them. Destroying an engine deals a lot of damage to the bosses main health, destroying two is enough to defeat it actually. The version I spawned here is way better defended on the top side, making targeting the engines more risky than engaging it from below. All of its turrets can be destroyed individually though, so you can effectively disarm it. The boss also has blind spots directly to its left and right, where none of its turret attachments can reach. But in general its tier 2 fighters will continuously engage you where ever you are.

Creating the boss had me rework projectile collision a bit, so that it function correctly with larger enemies. I also fixed some of the more game breaking bugs, together with the options menu this should allow me to give the game to testers soon.

Next week I want to focus on adding in more items, including some new melee and ranged weapons I drafted.

[sleeper_service]

45 items integrated so far.



Some of the stuff in action, among other things testing on-hit missile spawns (with 100% proc chance):

[sleeper_service]

Worked on a basic tutorial, taking place in a virtual environment. Added in many more passive items and weapons.

[sleeper_service]

Added a bunch of new actives this week. This is "Cover Fire Algorythm", which works nice with melee weapons as well.

[sleeper_service]

Week 17 and 18 where spent on adding a bunch of new actives, as well as a charge framework that limits their use. The game also has a second boss, the interceptor squadron you see me fighting here.

Actives now charge per second, per wave and/or per damage dealt, depending on type. The charge gain mechanisms can be freely combined, opening up the possibility for passives that give you various charge bonuses. Actives can also deplete their charge in different ways and some can store more charge than what is required to activate them. Passives can add to the max charge and the UI will adjust seamlessly.

Some of the new actives:
Rocket Pod - Fires and depletes continuously while you hold the active key.
Missiles - Deplete some charge for each lock on; missiles are fired when releasing the active key.
Ace Injector – Restores a heart, requires multiple waves to recharge
Cover Fire Algorithm – Restores shield and then quickly fires your current weapon in all directions. Works with melee too.

The new interceptor squad boss has you go against five crafts that can in some regards match your own. They are pretty competent at avoiding ground crashes with their boost and they are about as fast as you (unless you got boost passives). They also get faster and more aggressive each time you take one of them out and they start to use additional abilities as the fight progresses. Their low health is counteracted by their agility and once they start jumping it becomes even more difficult to damage them.

Along the way I also added in post-death husks for large hostiles and full item descriptions for everything thats in the game so far. There are only a few things I want to add before I'll go into limited First Access with this, mainly terrain variety in the form of collidable rocks and floating islands. Ill also spent at least a week entirely on debugging and testing.