Event Horizon released

I had big ideas for the map section but I've decided to cut it as it wasn't fun. I mocked up a quick title screen and figure I should get it out there a little bit. Let me know what you think! download

Fixed an old pathfinding issue

The enemy AI checks all the places it can go to in order to work out the best one. This lead to some nice complex behaviour with a relatively simple system. Because they don't have a specific goal in mind it didn't make much sense to use pathfinding algorithms for them. But then I had some situations where checking more than one turn in advance was required due to blocked hexes. I've implemented a little system where it checks a few turns ahead for certain things and it seems to be working.

Here you can see the enemy ship avoids my rather obvious trap!

Procedural Nebulae!

This turned out to be easier than I thought. I'm really happy with how this looks.

Map mode

I've made a decent start on getting the overworld map working. The map movement abilities are fun to play around with and I'm starting to add some map features. For nebula I've gone back to a love of mine <3 Perlin noise <3
Going to try to map something like this to the hex grid. Probably won't be animated but it's fun to mess around with!

New Event Horizon demo!

Get it here

New stuff:

• Music by Willfor!
• Loads of new interface stuff, especially in the tutorial
• Ray, Laser and Swift weapons rebalanced
• Phase array gives +1 energy instead of +1 damage
• You're now not allowed two of the same utility system
• Getting two weapons of the same type should be rarer
• Buff/Glitch system replaces ongoing effects- I'll end up doing something cool with this and utility systems at some point
• Probably a bunch of bugs

Event Horizon arena mode!

I'm pretty happy with this addition, it's a good step towards the big overworld game thing I'm planning. The interface screens and stuff are a bit terrible because I suck at that but I hope it makes some sense.

The finished game I envision won't have difficulty levels as this does; the ships with worse generators/computers for battle will be more manoeuvrable and have cooler abilities on the map.

Download
Please let me know if you come across any bugs, I think I've ironed out most of them. Or if you're new- how was the tutorial? What stuff didn't make sense?

Other than bug fixes, I'm going to take a couple of weeks off from spaceships. Make a small game or two and brush up on some maths.

Sweet new ship by Gnap (thanks so much for this!)

Rockets!

Rockets are fun to make! Took a while to get the movement feeling nice. Still not sure about the rocket body though.

Should be on track for arena mode demo in a week's time, I'm looking forward to playing it!

Big explosion!

Feels good to get back in the swing of programming. I had a memory leak with this, which was a HUGE pain but it felt good to fix it. Like removing a splinter.

4-Player Local Multiplayer Xbox-Controller Game Jam (4PLMXBCGJ) starts in about 16 hours and I've got my idea prepared! I'm going to try to learn to make some bad music tonight.

Quick update

I spent some time changing the LibGDX template/library thing I've been working on to help with game jams. It's not perfect but I like it better now. It took some time to refit Event Horizon with it but now it's working and I've got a better shield effect. Just got to put in arena mode and I can release another demo!

This weekend there's a mini game jam happening at my house. The theme is 4-player local multiplayer xbox controller games. A bit niche but it's going to be fun, I've got a nice setup for local multiplayer games and I'm interested to see what people come up with. The game I'm planning on making is very simple and should be possible to play with 4 people using only a keyboard so I'll release it here too.

Explosion!

Working on the ship death explosion and I'm just exploding tomatoes for now. This was tricky to code but it was fun to get it working!

Everdraed

I'm working on a way of displaying the ships as separated by some distance and Everdraed made this amazing animation to help out! I'll be using parts of it for inspiration for how to get the impact feeling good.

Even updateder demo!

Download

Had some good feedback from my friends and IRC buds and I'm pretty happy with the tutorial now! I think I'll put the map on hold for a bit and work on a practice mode where you fight multiple ships and upgrade in-between so I can test ship advancement.

Teleport!

Found a stopgap solution to my previous problem and I've been working on map abilities. I'll probably change it but I kinda like this teleport effect.

Need to update my enemy AI...

The code for enemy movement is so simple and lovely but it has some issues... Gotta think of a nice way of solving this without breaking the rest of the behavior.

Everything is fixed!

That took a while! I know it may look exactly as it did before but now it's better.
If you're a programmer you understand.

Everything is broken!

I decided to make some structural changes to my tools to make my code a bit more reusable and it's tricky going! I've got a mini game-jam happening at my house in a few weeks so I need to get everything ready for it.

Map movement

Been a while since my last update due to visiting friends and feeling ill. Hope I didn't lose my only fan! :) I'll be back to more regular updates now.

Getting everything working on the map has taken a lot of work. I'm pretty happy with where it is now and there's some interesting tactics you can use.

I've just realised that I never mentioned that Scut did most of the art for the demo part. I can't afford any more art now though so I'm going to try to pull together some stuff in a similar style for the rest of it.

Event Horizon demo

The demo for the ship battles is finally finished! In the full game there will be an overworld bit with surviving and enemy ships and upgrading but it's playable as it is.

Let me know if you come across any bugs or something's not clear or you think something would be cool!

Getting close to a demo!

I made this cool little borderiser tool so I could generate a glowy shield effect for anything. Works kinda well I think!

The game is getting pretty close to the state where I want to distribute a little demo. All that's left to do is to make a tutorial but this will probably take a few days because tutorials aren't much fun to code. I watched my friend play the tutorial to Hearthstone again to try to steal some ideas. That's a good tutorial!

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.