Warps n icons

Along with the usual bug fixes, I finished what I thought would be a great effect for the level/warp transition, seen below:

Unfortunately, a few days after working on that and switching back to other tasks, there was a noticeable stutter of the projectiles while they were in motion.  I didn't notice the slowdown until I put a build on to my phone again.  At first, I thought it was because of the new textures I added (I haven't cared about file size or my aggressive use of alpha shaders up to this point), so I focused my time reading up on and optimizing those areas.  After that didn't work, I rewrote and tried to debug the movement code for the projectiles.  Eventually I found that the effect's scripts on the camera slow things down even when the effect isn't actually on screen.

I replaced my crappy MSpaint placeholder room icons with something a bit more presentable.  More still need to be added - icons on the weapon buttons have been planned since the beginning and will help a lot.

That said, I started to play around with the UCLA mesh creator and have some promising results if I ever need the ships to appear 3-dimensional.  It really is a nifty little tool.  In the process, I realized I may need to do some editing for at least this particular ship texture, but that's a lower priority.

I'll be moving to Washington DC in about 2 weeks and hope to get as much done as I can before then.  Stay tuned!

Hey it's kind of a game now

Well, after tinkering with how weapon targeting/firing works, Enemy ships are now firing back at the player's ship.  I also created a HUD indicator for shield health that seems to be cooperating nicely, and fixed a few previously existing bugs as well.  I purchased an effects package off of the asset store today and plan on working one or two of those effects into the game over the next day or two.  It should look rather nice assuming they don't cause a slowdown on mobile devices (I can dream, can't I?).

Something else I've been putting off doing for a while now: I updated my version of Unity3D to 4.2.whatever and converted the project over as well.  Overall it was an easy process, except now some of the transparent/cutout shaders I've been using aren't so transparent all the time.

This used to work, I swear.

I also came up with an idea for how to do away with what currently happens when a ship dies (aka big bland explosion).  I'm thinking that combining this with something like this will lead to some nice looking ship debris.  At the very least, it will allow me to procrastinate from getting a text-dialogue-box-system set up.

Explosion effects are just more fun.

Small update

Took care of a few bugs caused by switching to using prefabs.  I'm able to swap out the enemy ships with a button press now.  No shmancy pictures this time.

More progress

About 2 weeks ago I got shields working.  (Changing the texture offset gives it a nice animation effect as well).  It does nifty things when it gets hit like making changes to the opacity to make it appear more alive. Intuitively, once the shield is destroyed, the ship will be vulnerable for a period of time before the shield charges again.  Missiles currently get stopped by shields as well, but that will probably change later on.  I plan on having a HUD indicator of the shield's status either inside or surrounding the current HP display.

I also finally decided on an object hierarchy for the ships themselves and started saving a few as prefabs.  A few other things will need to be reworked to be able to use them after adding them at run time, but that will be a rather major milestone taken care of once completed.

The next step big goal after that milestone is to get the enemy ships weapons and let them fire back for a change instead of the constant slaughter it's been so far.  I'm think I coded the existing weapon systems (which will eventually be featured in another post) in such a way that will make it an easy process, but I won't know for sure until I start coding that part.

Explanation!

So, I decided it might be a fun exercise to blog about my experiences making this game.  Let's get this out of the way: I was in love with the game FTL for a while.  While it may have taken some work, I thought it could have been ported to mobile platforms as well.  More than that, I thought it could have been fun on a mobile device.  The joy of a fun space-based roguelike on your mobile device, what's not to love?

Almost a year ago, I reached out to the FTL creators and offered my services to do it.  I got a response, but not the response I was hoping for.  They weren't looking to expand into mobile gaming at that point, but would keep me in mind in the future.

So I waited around for them to make the game on mobile, but as I waited, it sounded less and less likely to happen.  I decided to stop waiting.  Screw it, I'll make my own game.  With blackjack - and hookers!

So that's the jist of it.  I started working on it about a month and a half ago off and on.