The Colouring Book

There are five animated characters in the game: Rocket, SpaceMan, Alien, Robot and TimeBomb, and only the Rocket was colour painted until now. It's taken me the last three weeks of my spare time to colour through 111 frames. Here's a sample of the result:

After all this work, I'll make sure the animations are shown well zoomed in. And I'll hopefully use them in scripted tutorial animations.

Backgrounds and Nebulae

I've been slowly creating new deep space backgrounds and nebulae for each level, adding star particle layers too, and making sure they fill the whole viewport. All these layers are parallaxing, giving the game plenty of perceived depth. I've also given those planets some atmosphere and tweaked their colours a little bit. Up to date screenshots below.

      

New Menus and UI

Old news, but here are some screenshots:

A Year of Progress

So... not a huge amount of progress since I stopped posting on the blog last October! From what I can recall, I re-did the UI, got new buttons and fonts, fixed a bunch of bugs and worked on all the 45 levels, which are all playable. I still need to go through them all again and sort by difficulty level, and get them play-tested by someone.

In the process of building the levels, I added quite a few functionalities to the game. For instance there are now four types of characters which you can transport from planet to planet - Astronaut, Alien, Robot and TimeBomb. They also fight each other. Astronaut beats Robot, Robot beats Alien, and Alien eats Astronaut. The TimeBomb explodes planets 10 seconds after being dropped.

I've also created an audio engine on top of OpenAL and added some placeholder sound effects, like the rocket engine, star and power-ups and explosions, and I've had the help of my co-worker Darren, who so far has created two soundtracks, one for the menu, and one for in game. The in-game music is split in tracks, so I can flip the volume levels on each track depending on the situation, like when an Astronaut is aboard the rocket, the music becomes more exciting.

Besides audio, I also added Game Center support, all highscore tables are working and there's UI for that too.

Camera movement is so much better now too, it never shows space outside the game area, the rocket is usually in the centre of the screen, but if he approaches the edge of "space", the camera stops moving.

I'm now going through the graphics assets and either polishing, colouring or re-working them from scratch. My plan also envolves creating a bunch of background images and a few nebula and stars semi-transparent overl ays.

Here's the before and after of Asteroids:

      

These screenshots also show a timed level and the three blue character heads, indicating what the goal of this level is.

* Oh, right... I realise now that I hadn't even shown the old asteroids yet.

Learning Planet Design in 24 Hours

After a long time playing with all those images of planets from the web, I designed 14 new planets for using in the game. Many still need changes or touching up here and there. It was hard at first to understand what style I wanted and what would work well with the rest of the game. I think I downloaded all of NASA's available images of planets, asteroids and other celestial objects. Some of the planets are double-layered, so the SpaceMan and the Rocketship are shown behind the clouds, orbiting rocks or the rings of a planet. Here are some of them:

  

Grabbed from an old version on my iPad, for reference:

Space Editing

This is what the development level looks like in the editor. This is where I add one of every kind of object so I can try it out in the game:

And this is current level 2, where I've put a bunch of planets I copied off the internet to see what works and what doesn't work:

A Dash of Color

I had a go at painting the Rocketship. The Rocket was initially - maybe some two years ago - created in 3D in Blender, then exported to bitmaps; I loaded those into a vector graphics editor and drew it with black vector lines, and again exported that to bitmap form as a 4x3 texture atlas and yesterday I shaded and painted the bitmaps by hand. Here's what it looks like now with an unpainted image for comparison:

And with a passenger on board the lights come on and you can see a silhouette of a character through one of the windows:

This is the most basic addition to the set of objects: a Sprite. In this demo level I have it as a satellite but it can be any image or animation, static or moving. In SpaceEditor you can also assign a diameter and a density to it, so it will bump into the Rocketship and cause damage.

What you see here is a Teleport object! I added it last minute to the SpaceEditor and to the game. In the editor you create two or more of these, and in each you specify where it teleports the Rocketship to, so they can be linked in any way we want. Rocket gets in on one side, pops out on the other side with the same speed and orientation.

Flying Saucers with Freaking Lasers on their Heads!

The Lasers burn through your energy level, faster in Hard difficulty mode, slower in Easy. 

But you can shield yourself behind planets:

We are not alone.

Replaced the old sparkly sun flare with a new supernova shockwave style effect. This is because I quit the idea of colliding particles with planets so the Rocket could hide behind planets. This way, if he's in range, he'll get hit.

Added a Flying Saucer UFO! Flight from A to B always follows a wiggly nearly random line. It pitches and rolls too!

A Couple of New Features!

The Rocketship turns red with heat from the Sun:

Showing the total score, running taxi ride fare (countdown), score multiplier and destination planet up at the top left, number of lives and fuel down at the bottom:

Picking up Stars give you score multipliers:

We can now see the little guy through the window when we a client has boarded the rocket:

Power-Up! Displays an image of choice with animated "electron" particles around it. Fuel goes up when picking it up. All these objects are configured in the SpaceEditor:

Black Hole object! Immense pulling forces drag the rocket into it: 

End of level screens with different buttons for when you complete or fail a level, in campaign or arcade modes:

Can start in Arcade (no lives, you can pick your own level if you've unlocked it) or Campaign (3 lives for completing the whole Galaxy sequence and score accumulates):

Objects like this planet can move and rotate, as configured in SpaceEditor: 

     

Devastating Comet!