Lightning

Here's the lightning attack effect for one of the more powerful weapons.

One section of the game is almost in a demo-able state. I just need to fix up a few things and put in a tutorial, though I'm still not quite sure how to go about that. The game's about as complicated as Hearthstone so I might take inspiration from there.

Particle effects!

Here's some work-in-progress particle effects for a couple of the weapons!

It's so nice to be making a big game in a language and library that I'm familiar with. I've been trying to organise my code logically and I've just finished refactoring it all so it's all in a logical place. I've tried to program in a way that saves me time later on. When I made this before, I made an AI system that checked through the enemy hand to see which cards it should play. This was quite tricky to debug because I had to keep finding out what cards they had in their hand to see if what they did on their turn made sense. This time I've made the method generic and work on any hand of cards so I can get the AI to play my turn for me. It's also good for when I'm feeling lazy!

Big Game 1: Event Horizon

This game is a turn-based strategy card game about fighting ships and surviving in the galaxy following a recent catastrophe. It will likely take more than three months to make so I'll continue to update with updates about its development. I started making it as my first ever programming project many months ago which turned out to be a massive mistake (make small games first, people)!

I started all of these weekly games with the aim of getting a crash-course in different programming languages and libraries, as well as picking the library to make something big in. My weekly games haven't been very polished or pretty or well-balanced but I think I've learnt enough to start making something more substantial.

I got a great pixel artist to make some amazing art for me when I first tried to make it so that's why this (hopefully) looks good!

Game 11: LongBow

Another game in LibGDX. I'm fairly happy with the way this one turned out. You may be able to see I'm not great with anatomy and the enemies aren't very imaginative but I think it feels nice to play. As usual I've made it a bit too hard maybe but this one puts you back at the beginning of the level instead of the game at least!

LibGDX has some powerful tools behind it but things can easily go wrong with them. I've had a couple of bugs and, because I don't really understand what gradle does, I just had to make a new project and copy the code over. Dealing with images is really easy and sounds are no different. It all works in HTML with no extra configurations even.

Next week I might test out a couple of things in LibGDX to build up a bigger tools-library and then start working on a big game. This is the end of my weekly games but I'll be updating regularly with progress on my first big project, Event Horizon!

Walk cycle

First proper attempt at making a walk-cycle. Cribbed quite a bit but I'm happy with it. I think I might be able to do something like this without a reference next time! This week's game will hopefully be some sort of archery platformer thing? I've been inspired by TowerFall.

Game 10: Sloth Storm

Back to Java to try out LibGDX. I had tried to use LibGDX about a year ago but I was newer and couldn't get anything to work and it's been recently updated to be slightly more user friendly I think! LibGDX is a bit weird to get used to but that's mainly due to the fact that you code once and in theory can run on desktop, android, ios and html whic is pretty rad! It seems to have pretty good performance and Box2D is fun to use.

I had about 4 hours worth of problems making it work with html but got it in the end. I really like this library and will probably end up making my big game in it. I'll continue making a game a week for the next couple of weeks though. Don't want to start making something big in this library until I can find my way around it a bit better.

As for the game, I was making this hexagon grid thing for the first 6 days or so. I had an idea for a game that has Conway's Game Of Life-type rules but in a hexagonal grid and expanded for terrain types. The idea would be to subtly influence the lay of the land by changing a single tile every turn to reach your goal. I wanted it to be fun but I couldn't squeeze any gameplay out of it.

Sloth Storm was made in the last day because I wanted to mess around with Box2D and about 1/3 of the time was spent getting it to work with html so it's a bit plain. Pretty fun to make though!