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[TheCams]

This is nice! The new tiles really help with readability yes!

[Chocolate Pinecone]

This is nice! The new tiles really help with readability yes!

Thanks!

[Chocolate Pinecone]

Before starting my rant, the game has a Steam page now! Go, go, check it out!

While lots of games go into early access, they do not always make it easy for players to report bugs or give feedback. However, if you realize how important player feedback actually is, you should streamline this process as much as possible.
Keeping this in mind, I've added a feedback button to enable players to give feedback with only 1 click away.
Though opening a browser from the game code is not so hard, making it work cross-platform is.
My long term plan was to release the demo only on windows first, and then figure out how to port to linux and mac. However, with this necessary feedback button in mind I wanted to explore multi-platform setups a bit sooner.
One thing led to another and now I've rebuilt my programming setup to support all main platforms, and implementing the feedback button in the process.

This means a lot of preparing work has already been done to enable releases on Mac and Linux and the demo will be released on all 3 operating systems! Yay!

While you process this awesome news, here's graphical progress I've made.
I've added an outline to the level preview window and made it possible to edit custom levels by adding a "Design" and a "New" button as you can see here:




This also means I removed the level designer button on the main menu, and replaced it with the feedback button:



I also added a success screen when completing a level! I still want to add some animation to it, but here's how it looks now:

[Chocolate Pinecone]

The last couple of weeks I've been polishing little stuff and perfecting features mostly. There's 1 big feature I still needed to implement, which was Player death and respawn.

I started with death of course. I got the general idea working pretty fast, though I didn't know what "powering down" sound fitted the best:





A few polls later the votes clearly favoured the 1st sound.

Next up was respawning.
I didn't really know how exactly I wanted to implement this, but two ideas kept coming up in my head: Respawning on start, or respawning nearby the place of death.
My idea was to perhaps use the bodies of previous lives as clutter that could make things a bit more difficult for the player. But in the worse case scenario it could make a tight cavern impossible to traverse. I also thought about the possibility to be able to grapple "dead bodies" and move them around.
But how do I determine a possible place to respawn? Respawning on start position might be impossible if it's blocked by a crate or something, so then I should build an algorithm to find a closest available spot, or somehow protect the start position to never be cluttered.
All this was a pretty difficult challenge, until a Twitter user provided me with an alternative death/respawn idea. What if the player powers down and loses a life, floats for a couple of seconds and then powers up again. This solves the problem of finding an available spot, because the player doesn't need to respawn in a different spot. It also serves the idea of powering down that I had already in place for the "death" animation.

So I decided to go with this last idea. For now it seems to do the trick pretty well, and be more forgiving because the player does not need to backtrack.
Here's how it looks and sounds:





I implemented another nice little feature as well. You might remember the new success screen from the last devlog where the recorded level time is displayed.
Timing the player on level completion and then not giving them a time indication during play is just plain evil.

I don't want my game to be focussed on getting the quickest times, at least not at first. But if players really want to improve their time scores, I'd like to accomodate that.
This is why I decided to add an in-game timer option that is disabled by default.
You can see a small video of me setting it and then doing some sick crate tricks here:

https://youtu.be/m0hde2bB-is

After shooting this video I made the timer a bit more convienient by only starting when the player takes off instead of directly after the level loads.

That's it for now! I hope to be able to show something to you again soon!

Rocket Shipment is wishlistable on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1237310/Rocket_Shipment/

[Chocolate Pinecone]

After adding player death, player lives were next on the list.
The player automatically starts each level with 5 lives currently. When running out of lives, the game shows a failure screen as you can see here:





Next up was a fuel system. You'll start with a full tank of course, but throughout the level you'll need to refill or suffer the consequences.
An empty tank means no thrust, which means falling, which probably results in losing a life.
Refilling can be done through the use of fuel barrels. Grapple them like you would do with crates and refuelling automatically starts.
The fuel barrels weight and collision sound pitch change according to the fuel left in it.
Here's how this all looks:





I also made a small debug improvement for myself. Physics are hard to debug, so I thought it would be nice to be able to move objects around when debugging.
This is why I built this little functionality:



That's it for now.
I really need to update my trailer again, but I think I'll do some polishing first in some places.

See ya!

[Chocolate Pinecone]

I don't have much to show this time. I've been really busy with behind the scenes stuff like setting up a linux build and fixing bugs.
I decided to build on linux early to avoid big surprises just before the demo release.

I'm currently very well on track for the demo release. I set a deadline of Q2 2020 for myself, and because my office day-job hasn't found a new project for me I've been able to cross huge points off the to-do list.
The demo will still be pretty rough/unpolished though. I want to get the basics and some level components in there asap and let the discord community enjoy it sooner. They've been supportively waiting for so long that I want to do a closed release to them first.

Some other minor changes I've done in the past 2 weeks besides bug fixes:
- Let the player lose a life when out of fuel and landed - This way you don't get stuck with no fuel and no way to continue except to restart the whole level
- Adjusted initial cable length to only the needed length instead of the maximum allowed length - Improves overall smoothness when grappling during flight
- Added a scoring system - Score is determined based on lives left, fuel left and time taken to complete the level

The latter can be seen in action:





As for the next period I'll be focussing on some new features such as:
- Wall blasters
- Big ass doors
- Damagable crates

We'll see how far I'll get.
See ya!

[Chocolate Pinecone]

This took way longer than anticipated. I'm not finished yet, but the wall blasters are well underway.
Wall blasters will periodically shoot a bullet in the direction they're facing. That's about it.
It sounds simple, but shooting a bullet, bullet impact and integrating wall blasters in the editor really took a lot of time.
The wall blaster paved the way for a lot of future stuff in different ways. For example, I didn't have any code that restricts placement in the editor. Wall blasters need to be mounted on a tile, which means they can't be placed in mid air.
I now built a generic way of checking if a spot adheres to specific rules.

Checking if a collision happened with a specific type of object (a bullet for example) was also not possible, so I also built a generic solution for that as well.

I can't even remember all the other needed stuff, this all took too long.

Here's how it looks now! Don't pay attention to the ugly bullet:





See ya!

[JobLeonard]

Oooh, this looks like a cute take on the old Lunar Lander genre! Subbed

[Chocolate Pinecone]

Oooh, this looks like a cute take on the old Lunar Lander genre! Subbed

Haha, that's a nice take on my game! Thanks!

[OctoMini]

This is interesting! I have a soft spot for Lander games. In the 90s I played Lander:




And Auts:




And my first real published game was Lander Hero:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2xntTk6ThY

There can never be too many lander games. Will follow for sure;) Would love to try the demo!

[Chocolate Pinecone]

This is interesting! I have a soft spot for Lander games. In the 90s I played at school, and my first real published game was Lander Hero. There can never be too many lander games. Will follow for sure;) Would love to try the demo!

Very cool! I'm hoping to scratch that lander itch.
The demo will be released Q2 for the Discord community first. After a while it will then be released to the public as well.
If you have Discord, you're more than welcome on the server!

[Chocolate Pinecone]

I've worked on an array of different things for the past 2 weeks.
My last devlog showed some wall blasters. I've worked some more on these and improved the bullet sprite:





A bigger change is the brand new addition of breakable crates:



Unbreakable crates have gotten a darker color and are, well, unbreakable:



Only a few slip ups and the breakable crates completely break, making you lose the level:





Next to these new features, I've been wanting to update the ship sprite to be a little more complex.
I made an array of possibilities:



But stuck with the first one. Here's how it looks in-game alongside with proof I'm playtesting too much:



That's it for now.

See ya!

[JobLeonard]

Oh god, those new crates will provoke rage-quits, I'm sure

[Chocolate Pinecone]

Oh god, those new crates will provoke rage-quits, I'm sure

Muhahahaha, Guaranteed!

[Chocolate Pinecone]

TL;DR: Demo is available through the Discord

Boy oh boy! I finally released something to the fans!

Yes it's only a demo. Yes it's pretty basic. What do you expect from a PRE-alpha demo?
But man, it feels good to get something out there.

This pre-alpha demo is a small reward towards the discord followers that have been supporting me for so long. It's also a way for me to test my work on a small audience, iron out some bugs and detect what features are needed most while workind towards the full version.

I'll continuously improve the demo until I have a demo version that is suitable for everyone (including a small tutorial, a "coming soon" screen, etc.)
This final demo version will be published on the official itch, GameJolt and Steam pages.

That's the plan. I hope it will work out.

Here's some of the changes I've done while making the demo ready:

- Build 5 official main levels to play
- Add a little destruction animation for bullets:

- Adjusted resolution based zoom which could deform sprites a bit
- Fixed some editor related bugs
- Improved French and Japanese translations
- Implemented sound volume adjustment based on distance from player
- Implemented cursor hiding after a period of inactivity (only while playing levels)
- Added more logging for easier bug fixing later on

Join the Discord and come play!

See ya!

[Chocolate Pinecone]

Oof, these weeks were hard!

Apparently releasing stuff comes with a lot of annoying bugs, who could have known?
One annoying bug I just could not solve at first. I spent a couple of days trying to track it down, until I finally was able to reproduce it.
I discovered this bugger was only present in the Release build, which I cannot debug. Eventually I found out how to create a Release build that CAN be debugged, and solved it that way.

All this took a lot of time, but hey, I learned something new!

Now that things have calmed down I'm getting into the feature side of things again.
I started off light with some polish here and there, like this wallblaster firing animation:



I also added some very basic levels and tweaked around some things for stability and to make the game feel better.

All in all I'm very happy I made the decision to do a pre-alpha release. It's amazing to have such a positive little community dedicated to help with development this way!

Want to join our little club? Here's the link!

Hope to see you there!

[JobLeonard]

 

[Chocolate Pinecone]

[Chocolate Pinecone]

Progress on features is slow at the moment. I'm still pretty busy fixing bugs found by the Discord community, though the peak has passed.
Now that things have calmed down I really wanted to update the trailer. The last one was really outdated and slow.
I'm hoping this new one catches attention a bit more.





I finally took some time to do a little polish and chose to build an UI animation system.
I started adding fades and focussing/unfocussing animations to windows, which you can see here:



I've also added a little popping animation on the icon of the level completion screen. Neat, right?



The demo is continuously being updated, so come check it out!

[Chocolate Pinecone]

I have had these points on my list for forever. Sliding menu screens, fading windows instead of hard visibility toggling, little popping animations when winning a level.
I finally took some time and added them in the v0.0.5 pre-alpha demo update.

I first started with the fading animation for windows, and set up a whole base for UI animations with it.
THe result of fading windows is in my last post.


The UI animation system worked pretty solid actually!
While making further animations for popping stuff, I found some improvement points and expanded the animation system even more.
Some popping success GUI elements:


Eventually I took on the beast of sliding complete menus, which actually almost felt like a breeze to make because of the now perfected animation system.
Some sliding menus:



I'm noticing game is becoming more and more mature now that a lot of bigger bugs have been taken care of, and I'm polishing stuff left and right.
The planning board is slowly showing bigger features more prominently while the flood of important bugs and improvements are done.

I'm kind of intimidated by some features, knowing that they will take a lot of time and effort to round up and deliver.
I want to keep updating the game regularly and am afraid these bigger tasks will slow down my updating spree.

Still, I should also not push myself too hard. All in all this is (supposed to be) a thing I'm doing on the side, even though I've had tons of extra time in this COVID-19 chaos.
One side of me tries to do work on the game as much as possible now that I have the time, while the other side of me tries to slow things down to avoid a dip when ACTUAL work starts again.

Besides all these thoughts, I'm really thankful for the Discord community.
They really help with development and seem to be having a good time.
I honestly think they would not mind me slowing down when life picks up again.

Want to help me improve the game? Join the Discord!