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 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.