Flaming's Dev Blog

So I have decided to go with several different ways of letting the player get upgrades, and what used to be the upgrade system is being reworked into a skill tree. I’ve spent some time over the past few days coming up with skills for my first skill tree(Fighter), and I just got finished making it so I can have a draggable skill tree like in Path of Exile with all the necessary checks and restriction. It was quite fun figuring it out and trying to figure out what mess of words to throw into google to be able to find the things I needed.

I adapted it off of a video I found on making a panning camera, and then I had introduce the restrictions so you dont just keep dragging it away from view, and also had to check if you were actually clicking with the skill tree panel.

I dislike that it has been almost 20 days since the last time I posted anything or even really worked on this game, but between being really busy at work and dealing with shit in life I haven’t really had the drive to work, which is a really shitty excuse. 

So today I talked with some friends about different things upgrade system related to help me decide on how I want to do things before I get too into it. I haven’t really decided yet but its given me more ideas.

I also learnt how to use InkScape a little bit so I could use vector graphics for the player/enemy art. Made something fairly simple but its better than the circle from beforehand, still need to make a projectile asset

Today was quite productive. Finished up implementing the upgrade system and now I just need to design the different trees and their skills and get around to implementing them(still haven’t made the keystone feature but that’s for later)

I also made a scrolling background for the main gameplay because it felt weird without it moving, also made it purple so enemies stand out a bit more(that will probably change a bunch as I do things, might even make a gradient or noise color?)

The shader for the background was done using Shader Graph and it looks like this:

I’m probably going to change it to have a gradient as well and maybe some other stuff to spice things up, and I also might try and make it a bit more 3D later on down the line aswell.

I decided to spice things up a little with how the game looks so I looked into how to make a pattern based background in Photoshop. I’m still deciding on color choice but I think its pretty nice how it is right now

My updates have been getting very sporadic and rare, mainly because life is a mess and I don’t have the energy to get work done a lot of the time. Today I got done with most of the UI side of the upgrade system. Now I need to actually make a point system and implement the stat increases into the gameplay

I also need to write down the different skill trees and decide what would work well. I don’t think I’m going to hit my deadline for this sprint and finish all the tasks I set myself, but I’m still happy with the progress I’m making with learning new things and how to make stuff.

Got started on the upgrade system today, mainly got some of the UI done along with the beginnings of skills and player stats. Did some reading into talent trees here. Hoping to have at least the basics set up by end of next week so I can easily set up the three trees(Which are going to be sort of tank/slow/hard-hitter, jack of all trades, and glass cannon. Will have like a main skill in each tree, and you can only have one main skill. It will determine the primary aspect of your playstyle, but then you can spec into every tree

So I got around to making the main menu today, and tried out DoozyUI. Seems interesting and I think I will continue to use it in my project. 

Also thought up an idea while at work of doing milestone upgrades that would change the appearance of the players ship and would be quite substantial upgrades, but would be one time purchases and unlock a lot of new nodes to upgrade.

I need to start work on the upgrade system but at the same time that is a massive behemoth that is going to be quite difficult to take on and it make me put off work when I think about it.

So I’ve been out of it and did nothing for the past 17 days. Today I sat down and just wrote out some ideas for the upgrade system and also sketched out the menu.

The skill system is going to be kind of like a skill tree but some upgrades won’t have a cap, and things cost points/money/whatever instead of level up points, so you get those moneys based off of your score during a run

Sketch of the upgrade screen:

So the main thing I did today was get health set up along with UI to display it. I still need to improve how its displayed along with giving the player some form of feedback to let them know they’ve been hit. Maybe also introduce i-frames but I don’t know if that’s really necessary in this kind of game.

I also changed the controls a little so now the little player “ship” goes to just above the finger/mouse so you can actually see yourself instead of being hidden below your finger/mouse.

Also added a score multiplier system but losing multiplier hasn’t been implemented yet. Will add that to the backlog and hopefully implement that soon(most of the component for it are already in place)

Tonight was pretty productive. I was initially just going to make the horizontal and maybe diagonal spawn pattern for enemies and then make the score system, but I ended up making the chevron and circle spawn patterns as well which turned out to not be too difficult. 

I then quickly set out to make the score system and the UI for it which was made quite easy since I had already set up that event on enemy death earlier on when I first made my enemy script. Right now its just a very simple health * a value, but I need to introduce a multiplier system.

Tomorrow I want to make the health system but I don’t really know where to put the player health and how I wanted to do healing yet, but I’ll have to think about that one. Will probably go with a pickup to heal system, or maybe a very slow regen along with pickups could also be interesting so it is slightly more forgiving of the rare mistake. Getting hit should reset the score multiplier or atleast reduce it.

So tonight I made the basic system for enemy spawning. I also looked into events and how they worked and got that set up so I will be using that for the score system instead of calling functions from the player or enemy scripts which is really cool. 

Still need to add other enemy spawn formations and then I want to look into different enemy types aswell, maybe even limit formations based on the enemy type? Need to look into that.

Should make a very simple score system next and think up of a formula to determine how much score should be earned and how to determine a multiplier. 

So I wanna try out blogging and keeping a track of my progress using a blog. Yesterday I began work on a new project that I hope goes somewhere, it will be a retro/neon-esque simple vector graphics game that is like asteroids and skyforce.

Yesterday I got player movement working, and today I added constant shooting to the player.