Pre-Holiday Progress

Early Chrismas greetings to you all!

Funny how the week before the famously most peaceful time of the year can be one of the busiest. Not only did we have our very first presentation of our game to an audience, which felt a bit like our very own miniature E3 or Gamescom, we also decided to get as much as possible done before the holidays begin. So let us talk about our progress, shall we?

First up, because of the presentation, we made a first proper level. It's a couple of minutes long and features several different enemies and the temporary boss we showcased last week. The level is very challenging for a first level, so obviously we have to work on our balance. However, week by week, the game becomes more and more playable. When you are brainstorming about what your game will be, it is only a game in potentia. It is great to have this actually real and developing thing right under our noses.

This week is also about the shop. Our chosen deadline before the holidays is the next sunday, so it is still a work in progress. We can however talk a bit about our design choices concerning the shop.
Our current idea is to have different types of upgrades. Some you will be able to increase in level/strength, such as shield power increase and main weapon improvements. Others will function as a secondary weapon or a special attack. Finally, we also want to include perks. As our concept for a perk system stands right now, you will be able to buy only one perk each of the two perk types: Offense/Defense. Not all of these upgrades will be available at start, you will have to unlock them.
Here's what the shop looks like right now (WIP):

Ain't it shiny, folks?

Anyhow, there is more than just the shop we are working on. As always, we keep adding new enemy types, bullet patterns, enemy paths and levels to the game. We may soon have our first real boss! A highscore system is being designed. Busy, busy, busy. But fun nontheless. 

And... that's all for this week. Merry Christmas and see you next time!

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Progress on playability

Greetings everyone!

This has been yet another busy week, mostly because we were a little behind with our schedule on Monday. We managed to catch up, though. This week we made the game playable by implementing the paths for the enemies, adding the shooting behavior for the enemies and allowing the levels and paths to be built from XML files. This last thing basically means that we can now successfully create the levels in a separate file instead of having to put the level design into the code itself. The basics for this were implemented earlier, but only this week did we complete the code that allows us to actually read the files and use their data in the way we want to. As of writing this there are still some bugs in the system but those are already being solved.

What all of the above means is that we now have a playable, albeit very simple, game! As soon as the biggest bugs have been fixed we could just start designing levels and enemies and have a fully functioning game. However, that's not what we're going to do. Right now the enemy sprites are still simple 2D replacements for the upcoming renders of 3D models that'll look much better. Important things like the menu, high scores, pause and mute options as well as the HUD haven't been made yet. We still don't have a boss made yet, although we could simulate one by giving a regular enemy strong attacks and loads of health. We also haven't added the shop where you can purchase upgrades for your ship yet or implemented and tested the dynamic difficulty. As you can see we still have a long way to go, but it's exciting that the core functionality is now all there!

That's not to say we didn't add anything that isn't strictly necessary for the core gameplay, though. One of the things we added is a shield around the player that slowly fades when it accumulates damage. Another one is that we added knockback when the player bumps into an enemy ship, damaging both of them slightly and sending your ship reeling preventing the player from controlling it for about half a second to a second.

I also messed around a little with the bullet patterns to test the shooting system. In only 20-30 minutes I was able to whip up this bullet pattern:

In the picture you can see the temporary sprites for the enemies (the one for the "boss" is quite silly :P) and the bullets we use for testing purposes and the shield around the player. You can also see that the player bullets are not always spaced the same – this is because, unlike earlier, the positions of the gun are correctly recalculated when the player moves the ship sideways which causes the sprite to tilt, moving the guns closer to each other. It's a small detail, but one that's very noticeable when you're playing the game – imagine the bullets appearing out of thin air somewhere on the sides of your ship!

Next week we'll start working on the shops and upgrades as well as the bosses.

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The beginning of the hard work

Hello everyone! Thunder Struck Games here, with another update. In this blog update we will talk about the progress we have made during week 49, from December 1st to December 6th.

This week has been the busiest week as of yet. After finishing the designing process last week, it was finally time to actually start creating the game. Last week's Thursday we gave everyone deliverables for this week's Tuesday. Everybody kept their word and finished their deliverables. So on Tuesday, we already had three 3D enemy models and a player model, 5 work in progress soundtracks, and we had programmed the 'skeleton' about all of the needed classes. That's a lot already, to be honest!

On Tuesday we came together as a group to talk about our deliverables. The programmers came to our usual meeting place a little earlier and had a talk about the programming. There are two "big" pieces of programming that need to be implemented: the enemy pathing and the levels. Currently we are planning to read both paths and levels out of XML files and we're already done with implementing an XML reader, so we only need to think about in what way levels and paths will be programmed. We've already thought about how we want to make the paths work; we want to make a path a list of coordinates, and make the enemy  go through this list and go to every coordinate. For the levels, we are thinking about putting in every single enemy in the XML file manually. This will take some time, but it's easy to work with, so it'll be worth it. Later that day the programmers were joined by the rest of the group and our tutor to have an official meeting of 30 minutes. There we came up with some things that still needed to be divided around the group, like thinking up boss(es) and enemies, a world map, a HUD layout and some other things.

We started with programming the in-game state and created a viewport in the middle of the screen. On the sides we will make an ingame HUD, which will show in-game stats, such as your score, your total high score and an "EXIT" button. Below is a screenshot of the current state of the game and as you can see we have already programmed a playable player into the game.  Keep in mind that this image has been scaled to fit on the page, the normal game is full screen and the resolution is 1920x1080. Our player's spaceship can already be controlled. The white space is where the gameplay will happen. We will make a nice background for it, of course, but currently we don't have that yet.

Several of our team members started using Blender for creating the 3D models. That's right, we're using 3D, but we're not implementing 3D models in the game. How will you use the 3D models then, you ask? Simple.The player sprite is a render of a 3D model, which, on its own, already makes it look pretty nice. However, when the player moves to the left or to the right, the sprite will play an animation that makes it look like an actual 3D model!

We are planning to add this feature to every enemy as well. This will make the game look a lot more realistic than with 2D sprites like in the original Gaplus. It will also give that extra feeling of depth in an otherwise pretty flat environment.

As for the AI, the Dynamic Difficulty feature is also being worked on. The way we're going to use this is, based on how the player performs, the AI will make a multiplier, that is a parameter for all enemies that are created. For example, if the player has an abominable hit-rate, the enemies will start having a slower fire-rate
and movement speed. However, if the player knows the game, the enemies will move faster and shoot faster. This will improve replayability of the game and makes the game playable for casual gamers, but for hardcore gamers too.

A few of our team members are thinking of  bosses and enemies. We want a diverse arsenal of enemies and the bosses need to be memorable and unique. We also want some kind of background story, that has to link all the enemies, bosses and the player. These points, however, are a lower point on the agenda , so stay tuned for more news about enemies and bosses!

To sum up, the next two weeks we will be working towards the demo on December the 18th. We want to have a playable demo by then, where at least the player can move, shoot and die. The player is already able to move, so that is one point of the checklist.

Well, that's already the end of our weekly blog post, but stay tuned for further updates on our game!

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Designing the Design Document

Greetings everybody,

This week was a busy week for ThunderStruck Games. The design document for Space Hawk is almost done and so begins the next portion of our game: the coding. A couple of important things in preparation for the coding were done this week: we set up our SVN Repository and we set up the class structure for Space Hawk.

Thursday we had an awesome workshop about implementing particles in a game. Since Space Hawk is going to be a game featuring a lot of bullets, exploding spacecraft’s etc. this workshop will come in very handy.

Friday Manuel Kerssemakers from Abbey Games was the host of a lecture about his experience in making games. We learned a lot about the ups and downs of teamwork, how to exploit the strengths of your team members and much more.

This weekend everyone from ThunderStruck Games will be working hard on Space Hawk!

Oh yeah I almost forgot. Here we present you the design document for our game. We will use it as a guide throughout the entire development process.

Design Document[.pdf]

See you next week!

Maarten

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Site under construction

Dear visitors,

this weekend, we will update the site with a new layout. In the meanwhile, there will be parts of the website that are not relevant to our project or team. Please bear with us as we upgrade the site.

- ThunderStruck team

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Introduction to Galaga

Greetings everyone

This introductory post is the first in a weekly series where we will provide you with a short synopsis of the development progress. Code-named 'Space Hawk', we are here to present you what-will-be our re-make of Gaplus, a successor to a once popular game called Galaga. Gaplus was developed by Namco. They tried to improve upon game you might have heard of called Space Invaders. Whether they succeeded or failed is not for us to decide, but we do think the Galaga series offers exactly what we want to try and do with our game: dodging bullets and killing enemies.

Despite its archaic graphics and game design, we think that Gaplus, as the only one in the Galaga series, succeeded in providing fast and engaging gameplay throughout. However, AI patterns are very predictable and the types of threats the player is faced with is sort of limited. Enemies in Gaplus can sometimes drop power-ups or ship parts that the player can use to gain an advantage, yet there isn't much variety. With all this in mind, you can see why Gaplus was a great game during its time, but lacks quite a bit in our time. That's where we step in.

In our remake you can expect an improved AI and more varied patterns. We will also rework the level system a little bit to provide you with faster gameplay and more challenging boss encounters. Part of more modern games is the ability to progress the player with customization options and we want to do some akin to a shop or garage to allow you to improve your ship as you progress through the levels. Other than that, we will of course update the graphics and sound to today's standard, but the exact details we will still have to figure out. We are also not yet sure if we should use the same theme (bug-like aliens) or if we can derive a little bit.

In the meanwhile, have a look at the following video of Gaplus to give you a better idea what game we will be remaking.

To round things off for this introductory post, we want to remind you that the name Space Hawk is just a name we use internally until we come up with something final. But who knows, maybe it sticks.

See you next week!
- the Thunder Struck team

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Meetings and Scrap

At this very moment, we are actually in a meeting, while I am writing this blog. It is the third meeting, and we are discussing how we are going to design the game. Types of weapons, gameplay, AI, upgrading, everything is being discussed.

Prepare for a game with bosses, scrap, secondary weapons, and a lot of scrap. There is a lot that we are talking about, and are discussing. The discussion can get quite heated, and it's quite exciting. The only thing that we actually have at the moment is a logo, but figuring out what parts we should implement in the game is really interesting and in my opinion a lot of fun. 

We can already tell you that we have a few things that we won't implement in the game, although it passed some minds this meeting. For example, we won't have a crossbow ability available, same goes for a mole rat.

For now, I'll focus on the meeting, and let this blog what it is.

Cya later,

Timon

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