Blood Ship: Day 61

Two months... two friggin' months.

My ToonBoom trial ended and I had to fork over $180 for the yearly subscription, plus I bought some FX assets that may or may not remain in the final game. That brings the total cost of the game up to $310.97. That's cheap for a game budget, sure, but it's not cheap for me.

So some of the things that changed this week: the game plays a lot faster (which initially broke a lot of shit), the HUD is closer to its final version, and all the power-up icons have been revamped, complete with a new slot machine. You can see the latest iteration of the HUD above (click to enlarge).

Blood Ship: Day 53

See the new player ship above. I modeled it in Blender to get a reference (I suck at perspective) and animated in ToonBoom. It banks left when the player moves up and it banks right when the player moves down. This works as intended about 95% of the time, but the rest of the time it decides on doing a barrel roll for no apparent reason. I have an idea what's going on, but I don't feel like investigating it yet.

Despite my initial love for Spine, I haven't used it in weeks. Now that I've gone with more traditional animations, the predominantly tweened animations I did last month stick out like a sore thumb.

Games I'm currently playing on my MAME machine: the Gradius series, Raiden, and R-Type.

Wait. Not playing. Researching. 

Yeah....

Blood Ship: Day 46

About a week ago I broke the bomb ability. The problem was dumb and the solution was even dumber, but it's surprising I'm over a month in and that's one of the more serious issues I've had. I can only think of two or three other times I wanted to rip my hair out by the fistful. (These kinds of problems seemed to plague my last game attempt on a daily basis.)

As I've said in previous posts, I've been circling and circling around the imperfect stuff, improving instead of building new stuff. I think the time to branch out to new stuff is almost here. I'm thinking proper stages, new bosses, etc. I'd like to make a browser version, too, so people can try the randomly generated mode before downloading the complete desktop version.

I'm kind of shocked I'm 46 days into this. It seems like last week when I started this blog on day 12. I would have hoped to be further along at this point, but I'm not disappointed with the progress, either. This has been more of a learning experience than anything else.

(Sonic Mania isn't coming out today after all, but that's probably a good thing for the sake of productivity. My day job is unusually demanding this week.)

Blood Ship: Day 39

Boob physics, anyone?

Looks like I'm using Toon Boom Harmony for my animations. I've tried most of the competing programs, and I resisted this one because I hate subscription models, but I fell in love with it minutes after beginning the trial. Super smooth, super intuitive (I haven't even looked at the instructions yet), and the subscription thing's not nearly as egregious as Adobe's subscription models.

Today's the first time I felt unmotivated to work on the game. I'm tired and I just want to play Slime Rancher, which is probably the biggest threat to my productivity since I started this whole thing. (I imagine next week's Sonic Mania will be the next big threat.) I managed to get some stuff done, but I'm probably going to bed at a somewhat decent hour tonight.

Visually, there's nothing terribly new in the game other than some of the effects, but it feels a lot tighter than it did last week. I'm currently fixing the stuff that was handled sloppily during my push to get a working prototype as soon as possible.

Blood Ship: Day 32

I'm 99.9% settled on an art style now. I'm 49.9% sure I can pull it off. I still haven't finalized a workflow from sketch to game. I'm bouncing between a lot of animation programs again, trying to find the one which suits my style the most. This is more frustrating than it sounds.

Two problems this week: sometimes the wave generator doesn't shut off when the boss appears and, even rarer, the player's projectiles impact on something which doesn't seem to exist. I'm still in "ignore it and hope it fixes itself" denial, but that's kind of like just driving a car until the check engine light burns out.

I've been studying a lot of other shoot-'em-ups and paying attention to the little details which contribute to the way the game feels. I want to nail the feeling of what I've got before adding any more new stuff. I want to get the artwork a helluva lot closer to the goalpost, too (as you can see above, it ain't even close). The problem is I have the best ideas for new stuff when I make it a point not to add new stuff.

Here's my end-of-month budget report:

$18.99 Gamemaker (purchased during last year's Humble Bundle sale)
$14.99 Aseprite (already owned it, but haven't used it in earnest until now)
$0.99 A bullet-hell script (which may not make it to the final version)
$69.00 Spine (also may not make it to the final version)
$5.00 Some generic laser sounds (almost definitely won't make it to the final version)

$108.97. Not bad, I'd say.

Blood Ship: Day 28

Placeholder sound is in and I've been tweaking it the last couple of days. I now have generic laser sounds and bullet-impacts, as well as dynamic boss music. I don't plan on leaving any of these sounds in the final game, but it's amazing how much more fun it is now.

Endless mode is completely functional at the moment... you can play it forever (if you're good enough). Although there's currently one boss, he gets tougher each time you face him. To give you an idea of the difficulty: I've beaten the boss twice in a single game, but not three yet.

For the next few days I'll probably be adjusting what I have rather than adding anything new. I have a little over two pages of notes I want to address, so there might not be a whole lot to report for a while.

Blood Ship: Day 25

early draft of a boss fight... it needs a lot of tweaking

I played around a lot with Adobe Flash in my late teens or early twenties (whenever Newgrounds was friggin' huge), but I never really liked the look of what I could do with it. I think those preconceived notions of tweening software are why I was so reluctant to delve into Spine, but I'm happy to say I'm over it. Spine is fantastic.

The problem is I kind of feel like I'm going to break Gamemaker every time I import a Spine animation into it. Its Spine support leaves a lot to be desired, so much so I'm not sure it's entirely worth upgrading to the Pro Edition of Spine yet. Maybe I'll check out the unofficial runtimes and see if that improves things, but I'm being lazy on that front. I just have a feeling if I were to do it all over again, I would do it again with Spine, but not GM. I guess it depends on how well the competitors integrate these types of animations, which I haven't read up on yet.

Yesterday I played around with backgrounds for a few hours. The test failed spectacularly. I had a generic cityscape going by in the background and there was no middle ground between "too slow" and "so fast I'm going to puke." (I'm not exaggerating... I've never had a game give me motion sickness and crossed eyes the way my own did.) I assumed I could quickly slap some backgrounds together for testing, but it's clear the backgrounds affect the way the game feels more than I expected.

On the bright side of things, I think I'm zeroing in on an artstyle. The mere thought of it no longer fills me with dread.

Blood Ship: Day 23

Looks shitty in gif form, but you get the idea. (This build is actually from a few days ago, so some of the old placeholder art is shown.) You can see the bar on the left, which powers the blood laser once it's filled. (Why is the blood laser blue? I don't know. I'll change it later.) You can see the slot machine mechanism in the lower left hand corner, which is initiated by collecting a power-up. When the bomb is used, the central slot rolls over again, giving you a chance to win an additional bomb or a forward quad-shot. The game itself runs at 60fps, but the laser animation isn't reading well in the gif, which is less than 30fps.

Right now the player's collision is set to the entire ship, but the final version will probably have bullet-grazing collision; only direct hits on the cockpit canopy will register as a hit. Sometimes I turn this feature on when I'm testing, but it makes collecting blood and power-ups difficult. I'm going to have to figure out how to make two hitboxes, one for collecting and one for detecting enemy collisions. The only problem I foresee is animating the ship banking when it changes direction. When it banks away from the camera, the cockpit will be obscured, so I'm not sure how that's going to work.

So I'm trying out Spine after all. I got the Essential version. I'll decide later if I want the Pro edition... after a few more paychecks, anyway.

I plan on deciding on an art style by the end of the week. This means I'll be doing what I've been doing the last couple of days: just playing around with different art programs and workflows. Maybe I'll finally settle on a color scheme, too, but that's pushing it. So far, I've hit every goal I've set for myself, but the art is tricky for me. Yesterday, I procrastinated for the first time since I've started this project.

Blood Ship: Day 21

All the old placeholder art is gone. Behold some of the new placeholder art:

Other than explosions, weapon effects, the starry background, and the current player ship, there are no colors in the game. Colors come later because I have a hard time choosing palettes that don't rub me the wrong way. I'm still trying to figure out the art style, such as how goofy and/or cartoonish I want to get. Evil Dead 2 levels of goofiness feel just right, but it's surprisingly easy to step over that line. (Yesterday I created a creature clinging to the side of a missile, Slim Pickens style. I asked my girlfriend, "Too far?" Her answer was an emphatic yes.)

Even though the game looks janky, at least it's all me. It didn't feel right showing it to anyone with other people's sprites in it. This weekend I'll spend a little more time checking out Spine, but I'm also looking into cel shading since I already know my way around Blender... kind of. (In other words, I'm still not sure what this game is going to look like.) 

Tonight: drinks.

Blood Ship: Day 19

I opened the trial version of Spine and my eyes glazed over immediately. The second I saw the default marionette, I remembered my first time trying out the software. It's impressive stuff, but I don't think it's what I want at the moment, which sucks because I still want to play around with it.

A few days ago I said I was leaning away from pixel art. Now I'm leaning towards it. One reason is I fucking love Aseprite and how quickly I can go from creating something to seeing it in my game. To be clear, everything I'm creating right now is still placeholder art, but at least it's my placeholder art, which can be tailored to my enemy behavior. Doing art for the enemies gives me ideas for behavior, and creating behavior gives me ideas for the art, so it's best to juggle the tasks.

Having a better idea of what the finished product will look like will also help me design levels which compliment the art and vice versa. And, frankly, switching up tasks keeps me from getting bored. I think the player mechanics are as good as they're going to get (until I get feedback, anyway), so now is the right time to think about art. I'm not sure if now is the right time to think about backgrounds (and what degree of interaction the player will have with them), but that's a discussion for another time.

At the moment, everything is in four shades of gray because I don't even want to think about color schemes until I have at least most of the enemies in the game. And you know what? It kind of looks cool, black and white. 

Blood Ship: Day 17

I'm exploring art options. I thought it would be a pleasant break from the nuts and bolts. It's not.

Don't get me wrong: I love to draw and I think I'm better at it than the average person (only child + socially awkward = lots of practice), but this shit is hard. It's one thing to slap a sprite together as a placeholder or to let your imagination run wild in a sketch. It's an entirely different thing to make something with a specific purpose... that you wouldn't be 100% humiliated to show others.

I love 2D vector graphics when the artist can keep them from looking like a less-than-average mobile game, but they present certain issues if you're using Gamemaker. I also feel there isn't enough documentation on the process to feel good about using it. I'm not ruling vector graphics out at this point, but it looks less and less likely. I'm shying away from 8- and 16-bit pixel art, too, and my short-lived idea to make this stuff in Blender felt cheesy. I'm kind of running out of free options, here.

Yesterday I spent hours messing around with programs like Photoshop, Pencil 2D, Aseprite, and Inkscape, trying to find the workflow I like best. I took the easiest sprite to animate and went over it in each of the programs with disappointing results. Today I downloaded the trial for Spine and, even though I'm not thrilled about the price tag, I'm hoping it'll knock my socks off. The problem is I noticed the "(1)" at the end of the file name, indicating I've downloaded this thing before. Hopefully it's not a time trial.

Blood Ship: Day 14

The power-ups are working. In most shoot-'em-ups you grab a power-up and it gives you a single new ability. In Blood Ship you get a randomized combination of power-ups (up to three at a time), delivered through a kind of gambling mechanism. It doesn't make much thematic sense, but I think it's fun as hell and makes the gameplay a lot more addictive.

I also dumbed down the blood laser. The "smart version" had a single pixel width and, when activated, it would replicate several instances of itself across the screen, one pixel at a time. Once the far end of the beam encountered an obstacle it would stop replicating itself and create an animated "impact" sprite wherever it stopped. During gameplay, this looked like a single beam growing across the play field until it hit something or went off the screen. It worked better than I thought it would, but it was too slow to create. When I sped it up, the animations got wonky.

Although it looked like shit it worked. I planned to fix it later, but yesterday I went back to an instantaneous laser beam (press the button and it appears immediately, from the nose of the ship to the far screen edge) which allows enemies to cross its path without breaking it. I thought I wanted a beam that could get broken by obstacles, which was a complicated (for me) effect that should have looked cool, but it was a little jarring in practice. Allowing a nearer enemy to block the beam's path to farther enemies diluted the feeling of absurd power, thereby killing some of the fun. So the dumb effect works better for now.

Today I'm going to tackle the growing list of minor annoyances and tonight I'm going to work on new enemies and wave events... that's the plan, anyway.

very early concept art

Blood Ship: Day 12

Gradius-inspired placeholder ship

This is the first post about my video game, tentatively titled Blood Ship. It's a horizontal shoot-'em-up in which you collect the blood of your enemies to power your spaceship's laser weapon. At the time of this writing I have this blog set to private. If you're reading this, things must be going well. 

I've got a player ship, a functional laser, a handful of enemies, and a couple of bosses, all rendered in not-so-beautiful placeholder art. I spent the majority of this week working on power-ups and the method by which the player picks them up. I have no clue what I'm doing, but I generally try to reward the player for getting up close and personal with the enemies.

I just wanted a simple, fast-paced, and stupidly addictive high score chaser that leans towards horror themes as opposed to science fiction ones. I'm thinking along the lines of the enemy sprites in Sega Genesis games like Contra: Hard Corps and Sub-Terrania... weird 90s grotesqueness. Hideous monsters and oozing boils, shit like that. Besides, if the bad guys are flying around in space ships, it doesn't make much sense for them to bleed, and collecting blood is the entire point of the game's laser system.