Final Touches...?

Most people who played the game weren't aware of the goals of the game when initially playing it. And most people won't play the tutorial before giving the game a go either. So I've added these explicit goal hints to some of the levels. It's a flag that I set in the editor for each level, and at the moment the game displays a message in English only, with the number of stars the user has to pick up and the number of spacemen, robots, aliens that need a ride. Then after three or so seconds it fades away.

I've also tweaked the end-of-level screen with some colours, green for success, red for failure and added the number of attempts so far.

And finally I've fixed a bunch of issues in the tutorial, to make it even usable. The engine is switched off right until the end, so the rocket doesn't go flying about before the user reads the whole thing, the order of the messages was changed, and a few other issues.

Now I'm working on submitting a version to iTunes Connect... Is this the final corner?

Finally the Arrow!

If there's one thing that all the 3 people who've ever played this game have asked for, it's an arrow pointing to where they should go next.

The phone's screen is a small window into a "vast" universe. You've just loaded a passenger and he told you which planet he wants to go to, but you have no idea of where that is. So from now on, in Easy and Medium difficulty levels, you'll see a yellow arrow bouncing in the direction of the destination planet. On Medium, the arrow is only there for 3 seconds.

 

I've also changed the menu background from a 3 layer parallax of some really wide images of stars to a particle emitter and some nebulae images. It has a clean synthetic look, and the stars move individually and more fluidly.

 

Before / After

Taking my mind off the business plan...

... I've made a game poster and launch image! :D



It was mostly created using assets from the game and some hand warped text, all in Affinity Designer – great app! Object manipulation is so direct and you get instant feedback that you feel so much more in control.

I call it retro-naīve-pulp-scifi style. Obviously inspired by comic books from the 1940's.

* I'm a developer, not a designer.

Oh no, I'm adding Power Ups

Just when you thought the game was near ready, I decided to have a go with adding Power Ups, maybe even the kind of gems you can get with in-app purchases.

So far I only have three in-game buttons with ammo counts on them, and when they're empty, they slide away.

At the moment they don't do anything other than count down and slide away. But here's what I want to do with them:

- Top one should buy you some time to finish your level. Maybe 10 to 20 seconds.

- Middle one hits all enemies on screen with a blast. I guess that will be for UFOs only. Maybe it switches off blackholes, comets, sunflares for a while too.

- The one at the bottom turns on protection against lasers and collisions for a little while.

Configure that Rocket!

One idea I've had for a long time is to be able to configure the rocket by tuning variables like power, steering, weight and strength. That's just what I've done with this first version of the Rocket Configurator. You get to it from the Play screen:

Power is obvious. Steering effectively gives it more powerful steering jets, turning the ship more quickly. Weight makes the rocket lighter and direction changes easier. Strength is how well it handles collisions with rocks and planets.

The player can't max out all four variables. If each variable has a range of 0..1, the sum of all can only go up to 2 and the default is [0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5].

It would possibly, maybe, be cool to have this configurator on the Apple watch and be able to change it at any time. But that's a stretch goal.

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: