Health bar
A health bar has been added to the monsters. I will probably add a health bar to the buildings as well.

Right menu
Been working on the right menu of the game. To be able to build the buildings in the game a button for each building will be present in the menu to the right of the map. This have been taking a lot more time than I first thought, so I do not have any screenshots to show yet :/

Opening ceremony
My workplace, a.k.a The Game Incubator Göteborg had the opening ceremony this Wednesday and the party was a fact 🙂 Met a lot of interesting people and game companies. which I both get inspired from and maybe collaborate with later on. Right now there are ~17 persons working here with games or game related stuff and there will be some more soon.

My old workplace
Last week I wrote that I will go back to my old work at the 1th of mars, but that’s no longer the truth. I did quit my job this Monday, so now it’s game development all the way. Or at least half the time due to that I need some sort of income at least until my game release. So if you have any coding that needs to be done, just send an email. Have 6+ years of professional experience with programming. I will translate my Linked in profile to English later today.

Here is a snowy picture I took yesterday from my balcony. 🙂

The game
All the values in the game have been balanced. So now, for example you don’t have to mine material for 5 min just to build one building anymore. Also made some refactoring of the code which is hard to explain in a blog post, but it has to be done and it will make my game development easier due to the code will be easier to navigate. 🙂

The future
But most of this week have been to plan the future. My “vacation” from my regular work will end the 29:th of february. Therefore I been thinking a lot of how I should do with everything. Hopefully I will have a better post of how the future of my game and game development will look like next week.

It’s been I while since I last updated the blog. But now Christmas and New Year’s Eve is over so it’s time for an update of my gamedev blog again.

Each building need electricity to work. Like the lamp needs to be connected to a power plant somehow, otherwise it won’t light up the ground around. Before you needed to build a pipe between each building to connect them. But since last time I have experimented a bit with a radius of each building that connects the electricity over the air. So that you don’t have to connect every building side by side with pipes.

A circle is shown of how big of an area the building will connect to. A line is also shown to which building it will connect to if built. The line and circle will of course look a lot nicer in the end product.

I have also added a bar that shows the build progress of a building. The color scheme will be changed later on, this is just a first draft. Will add similar bar to show the health of the building next week.

There are still a lot to be done until it’s finished, but now it start to look more and more like a real game which is nice.

Since last Friday I made a game from scratch. Actually within 48h 🙂 If you haven’t tried it already, you can read about and try it here.

Progress of the actual game.

The mining holes are now lit up during the night so the player see them and know where to expand the base towards.
All the buildings has the visibility of 1 tile near during the night. Note that the fading of the light will be a lot smoother later on.

I been thinking a lot about how to make the game fun during this week and also how to make the game as minimal as possible so I have a chance to finish it within a decent time frame. Right now I have to many ideas that I want to implement, but I’m only one person so I really need scale the project down to be able to see the finish line.
So next week there might be bigger changes.

Other than that I have done some background work and bug fixes which is quite hard to show in a screenshot.

I made a game from scratch this weekend. Participated in Ludum dare 34 which is “create a game in 48h with a theme” The theme is announced 3am saturday (swedish time) and the game has to be done by 3am monday.
The voting for theme was tied so there were actually 2 themes this time 🙂 The themes was 2 button control and growing.
My game is called AnglerFish, try it out

This week I moved to a new workplace which I have been looking forward to for a long time. There will be several other game developers sitting here as well. So it’s going to be really fun to meet new people and have more people to discuss game dev with. We will also have a Xbox and Playstation with a projector to play with during our breaks 🙂 So pretty awesome! My new workplace look like this:

Progress of the game

Many small fixes has been done this week. Now the electricity consumers can use power from different producers (a.k.a powerplants) instead of just one.

The map has to be lit up to be able to build something, so you have to do your building during the day and focus on defence during the night when the monsters spawns.

Mine holes are now placed in a random order over the whole map. One mining hole is placed within every 10 tiles in a circle from the spawn location (start position). So there will be one mining hole (purple square) spawned in each of these colored circles.

A bug that crashed the game if you removed a tile that still was under construction has been fixed.
The monsters can now span over more than just 1 tile. So I can add bigger monsters which is probably needed later on.

Ludum dare

This weekend I’m going to participate in Ludum Dare which is “Create a game from scratch in 48h” The theme will be presented at 3am tonight so I will start as early as possible tomorrow morning and have it done by 3am on the night between sunday and monday.
So on monday I will have the game uploaded here on this homepage so you can try it out. Not to be confused with the game that I been writing about in this blog every week.  I might even stream the development on twitch. So checkout my profile on twitch during this weekend if you don’t have anything better to do 🙂

Words that you might not understand:

Spawn: When something in created during game play. For example during the day there will be no monsters on the map. But when the night starts, a monsters is created, for example every 10 seconds. So the monster is created from thin air so to say and this is called spawn. Same thing if you refer to your spawn location. This is the location where you start the game.

Twitch: A website that shows people playing games. But also showing people creating games which will be the case for me this weekend.

This week there has been a lot of none game creating stuff going on :/ But I manage to make some progress anyways. 🙂

The Tesla coil now attacks in a more realistic way. My idea how the tesla coil attack should be programmed turned out like I imagine it. Math is fun kids!
I will also have some kind of cannon later on, that shoots the monster more traditionally, like you have seen before in previous posts.

Upgrades are added to the buildings. The lamp for example, can light up a bigger area but it will then demand more electricity of course. All the buildings will be upgradable later on and a better UI instead of just one “upgrade” button will be used.

You can not longer put a building on water and mines can only be built on a mine tile.

The background tiles can now be animated as well. First out is the mine tile which glimmers so that the player will recognize it and get the idea that it’s special somehow.

Some small bugs are also fixed but I probably introduced some new ones instead. 🙂

Words that you might not understand:

UI: User interface. How the user interacts with the game. It should be obvious for the user that a particular button does what the user thinks it will do and the user should find the wanted action where they think it would be. If this is the case, then it’s a good UI.

Tesla coil: Yes, they are real and exists in real life but I don’t think they can be used as a weapon though. Check it out on Wikipedia.

This week I got a new rejection of my suggested company names :/ Apparently AnglerFish Studios AB can be mistaken for Marulk. (Which is the Swedish name for AnglerFish) so I had to come up with new suggestions.

On the developing side I implemented so that the monster now attacks buildings in the game. Each monster has an observer area, so if a building is inside that area it will attack!
Also I’ve been fixing the Monster AI priorities to be better. They now have priorities when deciding which building to attack.
See below how the logic works.

Resources is now needed to build stuff and also for repairing the building (The repairing part is not yet implemented)
Also solved an old bug 🙂