Anyway, if anybody else out there wants to try to use it, I think I'd be up for helping them get it integrated into their game. It might take some time and effort to do that, seeing as how I've just stripped it straight out of my game and uploaded it, but I think having additional games using it might make it a more versatile UI solution anyway. And that's a good thing, as far as I'm concerned.

Here's the URL: https://bitbucket.org/rbwhitaker/starbound-ui

At any rate, I'm excited about what I created. I got a lot done, and built a little specialized game engine that would support all sorts of different gameplay types. I didn't get around to rounding out those gameplay types, but that is the next step.

My last week at work got really busy, and my whole weekend was basically eaten up by some events that were scheduled months ago, and I couldn't get out of. So I didn't finish up in the way I had intended to. But I still feel like I made a pretty decent game that I can be proud of, and a little more time and effort to add some polish and cleanup would finish this game up nicely.

I intend on posting a final download (final for the competition, I might keep working on this between competitions, and I might even continue with it next competition) and posting my UI stuff in a separate BitBucket repo that is public. That will be my job for tonight!

I sorta broke the different "perspectives". They both have the ability to be controlled simultaneously now, because it's split screen. So the F7 keyboard shortcut doesn't work anymore. Instead, you just use the Player 2 controls! Which… well… it's an Xbox controller. Obviously that needs to be cleaned up eventually, so that two people can set things up no matter what input devices they've got.

I still agree with the damage thing. Having cracks form around the planet would be awesome. I hope to still get to that before the end of the month, but there are a lot of things to do still that are higher priority.

I didn't know the program crashed when both players died, but I'm pretty sure it's related to a bug I fixed just after deploying. Basically, the engine sound plays at a volume equal to the maximum thrust of all ships, but the second there aren't any ships… boom. Crash. It's fixed now. Maybe I should put out another build with the fix.

The LeftControl thing, I moved it to Right Alt. Which I honestly hate. I was trying to get Player 1 off of the left side of the keyboard so that Player 2 could use it, but even if that's the case, Right Alt just wasn't easy to get to for some reason.

Eventually, I want all of the input stuff to be changeable. Possibly the first step is to just externalize it to a file so people can change the settings. That's easier than building a whole UI for it, but the UI ought to be the final solution.

Thanks for trying this game out after both releases, Marcus!

First of all, the game looks awesome - the particle effects you've made really fit and do a lot to improve how the game feels. If you want to change some of them, I won't argue (because you probably have a better idea of what it should look like), but I think they're just fine how they are.

Second, I couldn't get switching perspectives (between the two players) to work, I was always stuck in control of the ship on the left side of the screen. Also, holding LeftControl didn't slow down rotation and acceleration for me, which is odd. Did you take that out, or is it just subtle enough to be easily missed? However, I love the addition of the second planet! It was a nice extra obstacle when I was just flying around destroying asteroids, which I did a lot more of this time around, and the health system you have for both planets is pretty good. It would still be cool to see damage at the specific location each asteroid hits at, but this is probably the best approach looking at things realistically, unless you happen to have a lot of time to spare.

Also, I realized that the program crashes every time both players have died. You may already know this, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

Overall, I think you've got a really awesome foundation here that I'm excited to see expanded upon. Keep up the good work, RB!

1. I'm glad the download worked for you. I was hoping it would, though I suspect I've got some work to do for people who don't have XNA and VS installed Even though ClickOnce is nominally supposed to take care of that, my gut tells me it isn't.

2. There's a keyboard shortcut (F2? F3?) that puts the game in full screen mode, and you can also resize the window as you see fit. I'm contemplating giving the player a way to zoom in and out as well, though that's easier done on a mouse than keyboard. I'll play around with defaulting to a square and see how I like that.

3. I hadn't thought about the asteroids having gravity. That's not a bad idea. If I did, it would definitely have to be proportional to their size, so little ones have little or no affect on your ship. The way I've got my code, it would be a piece of cake to add that in and see what it's like. I actually think the large asteroids are bigger in appearance than I initially envisioned, and the planet, perhaps smaller. If I made the two more different in size, there may not be the same "longing" for them to have gravity. Even still, it should be easy to add and experiment with, so I'll do that.

4. I'm not sure why, maybe something about the art style, but I had envisioned cracks in the planet as well. I'm not an artist, so I might have to get creative on how that will work. But that's definitely the direction I was leaning. But the thought of these white cracks forming in the planet (that possibly heal over time if you can protect the planet well enough) and even the possibility of little pieces of the planet breaking off and drifting out into space seems like a really cool concept to me.

5. I do like what you said about the aesthetics of the cities. They give variety to the planet's surface, which I think is good. I might throw in some little forests and mountains as well. I definitely am going to move away from having them evenly spaced though, and probably make them a little smaller (shorter).

6. With regard to what you said about once you were in a stable orbit, you tended to stay there… that will change when the game world has more than one planet/moon in it. I had it earlier on, but just the way the mechanics worked, it was very tough to get in orbit around that planet. So it needed some cleanup work, which I solved temporarily by just removing the second planet. If there are multiple things to defend, you probably won't feel comfortable just sitting in orbit around one. (It is also interesting that your approach was so conservative and defense oriented. I tended to race out to get the asteroids before they got to my planet. So I was out and back and out and back all the time.)

7. I know what you're saying about the large group of little asteroids. Sometimes, when I hit things, I think, "Well crap. I think I just did more damage than if I had just let it go." When they spread out like that, it makes things interesting. I think the concept of spawning them that way on occasion sounds really promising. I'll have to try that out too!

Thanks for trying all of this out, and for giving such good, thoughtful feedback about it. It will help make my game even better! Be sure to claim that Moral Support achievement (even though I know that's not the reason you posted here).

Also, I had a lot of fun playing your game - I think it was suitably difficult, maybe a bit easy, although there's a couple of suggestions that I'm going to make that might fix this, and the mechanics were very well-done, although, again, I do have a suggestion or two. The main things that stood out to me were that, first, the screen shape makes playing more difficult when it probably shouldn't be, that the asteroids, primarily the large ones, don't affect the player's flight path at all, and that yes, the planet's current health-system could use some improvement.

Although my first thought was that the game should probably be full screen, I realized later that that's not necessarily true, and that there may be reasons to avoid that. However, unless you have a very definite purpose in keeping the game window as it is, you should at least make it square, because it's annoying how it is now, where you can't see very well up and down, but you can left and right.

Also, I did really like the gravity gameplay mechanic - it was a welcome difficulty boost, because otherwise things would be too easy, and I had a lot of fun getting into a good orbit around the planet. If it was too big, the orbit took too long and it was harder to keep the planet safe, but getting into a closer orbit was difficult, but also very fun, so really good job there! However, once I got into a good orbit, there was no reason that I should ever leave, unless I just felt like dashing out and destroying a big asteroid for the fun of it, and so things got a bit slower. Partially because of this, and partially because I just want to have to deal with gravity more, I think that the asteroids should have a gravitational affect on the player (or, if they already do, a much bigger one). Probably not the small asteroids, and the medium ones only to a certain extent, but if a large asteroid gets close to the player in a stable orbit, I think it should pull them out of it, or at least mess it up, and the player should have to be careful when weaving in between them.

Finally, I had an idea about the planet's health system. I agree that every hit should cause damage, and maybe that damage can be in cracks and breaks in the planet - for instance, the first time an asteroid hits a spot, some cracks appear just on the surface layer of the planet, and the next time one hits, the cracks go deeper, and then deeper, until they reach the planet's core. If the cracks reach the core, or if the cracks reach a certain depth all over, then the planet is destroyed. And, of course, the larger the asteroid, the more damage it does. Also, I think you should keep the cities, but for purely aesthetic reasons. I think they make the planet look more interesting, and every time one is destroyed, you can't help but kind of feel bad for the people who you can assume live there.

So anyways, those are my thoughts. Terribly sorry for the long post, haha!

(Oh yeah, I remembered something else I thought of. When I was playing, a lot of times I would shoot out at the asteroids long before I could see them, and every once in a while a really big group of small asteroids would be hurled at the planet, instead of one or two bigger ones, and this was a lot of fun to see and try to fight off. Maybe, every once in a while, you could spawn lots of little asteroids heading in a similar path, rather than a variety of larger ones. This may end up not working out, but I think it's worth a try.)

In regards to your actual update, awesome! There's really not much there at the moment, but that's okay, because it sounds like you got a good foundation set up yesterday, so that today you can really get some work done.

I'm still debating on whether or not to post something at the bottom when I make the update. I think for the moment I'm going to, and delete the update announcement from the day before so that there's only ever one.

I'm open to feedback on this change in my approach.

Do you have a particular market in mind that you'd like to get this on?

( Also I too like the banner )

The Game

Flame and Frost: Orbital Defense is a computer game that combines the space blasting action of Asteroids with the orbital mechanics of Kerbal Space Program.

The player controls a ship, armed with a blaster, given the task of defending the planet from incoming icy comets (the frost) and flaming asteroids (the flame), all while having to deal with the gravitational pull of nearby celestial bodies and other cosmic disasters.

Definition of Done

While I don't expect this game to make me rich or anything, my real goal here is to make a game that has a reasonable scope and actually put it on the market. Like I said, I don't expect to make tons (or any) money on this thing, but I'm really only going to count myself successful on this game if it actually reaches the market.

Since I know that leaves a lot of logistical things to do, I'm going to have to have a playable version of this game very early on. I have a goal of having a working version (with UI and everything) by the time the first three day weekend ends. (That's also when the first playable demo should be available, even if I don't quite get all of the features I wanted up and running.)

Downloads

Frost and Flame: Orbital Defense 0.4.153

This download requires .NET 4.6, which is the one that hasn't actually come out yet. (I'm sorry! I'm just too excited about the new features!) I think it will download that automatically, but if it doesn't, you could always go install the Visual Studio Community 2015 release candidate, which comes with it.

I also don't think this installer will install the XNA redistributable. I'm assuming that basically everybody who is in the competition has had XNA installed at one point or another, but if not, give it a try anyway. It might work. If it doesn't work, then you can go hunt down the XNA 4.0 Redistributable from Microsoft.

If you have any problems with the download, please let me know so I can get it fixed.

Achievements

Thinking Ahead: Spend time before the start of the competition planning your game.
Happy Accident: You accidentally create a bug that leads to humorous results. Post the video or screenshot in the Happy Accident thread.
Moral Support: Leave a comment on somebody else's game thread with (constructive) feedback.
Lonely: Program on a Friday or Saturday evening.
Game Over: You implement the ability for players to lose the game. (Also, you just lost the game.)
Vincent van Gogh: You create your own artwork for your project.
10 Hours: You spend at least 10 hours programming your game during the month.
25 Hours: You spend at least 25 hours programming your game during the month.
50 Hours: You spend at least 50 hours programming your game during the month.
½KLOC: Your game reaches 500 lines of code. You're off to a great start!
1KLOC: Your game reaches 1000 lines of source code. Making progress! Excellent!
2KLOC: Your game reaches 2000 lines of source code. Keep it up!
3KLOC: Your game reaches 3000 lines of source code. Your game definitely has some weight behind it!
5KLOC: Your game reaches 5000 lines of source code. Well done!
Silence is Not Golden: Add sound effects or background music to your game. 8 is Enough optional.
Less is More: Lines of code ain't everything. Sometimes, the best solution is to refactor to eliminate redundant lines of code, leaving you with less but better designed code. Do this and unlock this achievement.
Time Machine: Worked for over an hour on code that you rip out later that day.
The Tinker: Fiddle with a complicated piece of code and get it to work only after a lot of failed tweaks.
Headbanger: Use recursion in some form or another in your game.
Prototype: You have something that could loosely be called a working game by the end of the first weekend.
Way to Brag: Claim at least 15 achievements.
The Great Unveiling: Provide a download for your game.
"Research": You spend a few hours playing a game when you should have been making one.
Leveled Up: You learned something that you didn't know that you can reuse in other games or other programs.
Two Can Play This Game! You make your game multiplayer (same computer/device, LAN, or Internet all count).

Latest Screenshot

Daily Log

Day 1:

• Got some key pieces up and running, including planets, the player ship, velocity, gravity, and basic keyboard input.
• I seem to have a problem with precession—where the periapsis (the closest part of an orbit) is different in each orbit. That shouldn't be happening with a single celestial body. (Hm. Just had a thought. Maybe I need to remove the mass of the ship from the equation, and calculate the acceleration due to gravity, not the force.)

Day 2:

• Fixed the precession bug from yesterday.
• Added bullets.
• Added comets and asteroids that rotate slowly and are affected by gravity. (No practical difference between them yet, just visual.)
• Made it so bullets weren't affected by gravity.
• Bullets expire with a time-to-live feature (10 seconds).
• Things can collide, asteroids break apart, and the player can die by hitting a planet or an asteroid.
• Added in some sound effects for firing, destroying things, and dying.
• Players now have lives and a score (+100 points for hitting an asteroid, -500 for hitting a planet, subject to further tweaking).

Day 3:

• Markers show where asteroids and planets are off screen.
• Respawning new asteroids, reworked later in the day to spawn more continuously (up to a certain amount).
• Cities were added, but will likely be removed. I want every planetary impact to be bad for you. So the planet as a whole needs some sort of health system.
• Orbital path preview, shows you where you're going and turns red if you're about to hit a planet. This makes it much easier to see if your current orbit has you headed for trouble.
• Got rid of the second planet. It's gravity messes with things. I need to revamp the way gravity works to have a finite range for it to work very well.
• Added a minimap in the lower left corner, showing you the whole world and where planets and asteroids are within that.
• Made it so the player wraps around to the opposite side if you get too far away. Asteroids, however, despawn.
• Got some work done on my UI stuff.
• Added a button to reset the game back to the starting point.

Day 4:

• Lots of work in the UI code that made only a tiny amount of visual or functional difference in the game. (Kinda disappointing, honestly.)
• When you run out of lives, the game starts over.
• Added line drawing to the game. The world's outer edge (where you wrap around) is now drawn, as is a circle around the planet. I have plans to push this a little further, as a stylistic thing. It looks strange for now, but it will probably look nicer when I add more in.
• I'm now drawing a logo at the bottom of the screen. That probably won't stay once I have a main menu.
• Download is now available (which I give only a 50/50 chance of actually working for people, but give it a try anyway).

Day 5:

1/6 of the way done already. I was busy doing book stuff, and didn't really even get a chance to work on my game. So… guess that's my update!

Day 6:

• Fixed a bug in the logo at the bottom (didn't draw the horizontal line).
• Planets now have health, not based on cities.
• Planets now have a health ring that shows their health. I still like the idea of the planet having cracks that move towards the center, but I'm not sure on the mechanics of doing that just yet. This is a simple solution for the short to medium term.
• If a planet runs out of health, it goes away.
• Asteroids do damage to a planet based on their size, and bullets also do a small amount of damage.
• I added an outer range for gravity for planets. Outside of this, gravity has no effect, but it should be far enough away it wasn't doing much anyway.
• The keyboard input now has a fine-tuning feature. Hold LeftCtrl down and you won't turn or accelerate as fast. This is great for getting into tight orbits or fine tuning your aiming at little asteroids that are far away and drifting further.
• Introduced two bugs:
  • If you destroy a planet that another one is orbiting around, the program crashes. What should actually happen to a planet who's parent goes away? Should I just switch to having all planets follow gravity instead of using a perfect circle? That feels like a good direction to head…
  • The arc drawing is somewhat… unperformant. Rather than generating new geometry and sending it to the graphics card every update, maybe saving it and only regenerating it when something changes is better.

Day 7:

We're now a full week into the competition, and I feel like I've still got so much to do.

• Fixed the arc drawing performance, though there's still probably room for improvement.
• Fixed the orbiting bug, this still requires some additional thinking to get it right, but the crash is gone.
• Added in a second ship that is controlled with WASD. Pressing F7 lets you switch views. This is the beginning of multiplayer.

Day 8:

The second weekend has arrived! I got quite a bit done tonight, but I'm hoping for even more tomorrow and the next day.

• I did a lot of the cleanup that I was hoping to do, and I like where things sit.
• I kept making changes to the rendering to allow it to be drawn at a size besides full screen and in a location besides the top corner.
• I added in a second view (vertically split) for a second player. So they now both get their own screen!
• The performance was suffering a bit, so I added in a debug mode (F3) that lets you see the frame rate. The performance bottleneck appears to be the part that draws those arcs (still) and the course plotter (the dots that show you where you're heading).

Day 9:

I didn't get as much done as I had hoped, but I guess I shouldn't complain. Things came along well enough today.

• I fixed the performance bugs, and learned how to use the Profiler that is built into VS. I've been using a 3rd party profiler that I haven't liked and isn't free anymore, so this is a nice change.
• Added support for the Xbox controller as an input device.
• Lots of particle effect framework code, and working particle effect for the engine thrust!

Day 10:

We're now 1/3 of the way done with the competition, and 2 of 5 weekends in. I still feel like there's a ton left to do, but I'm liking what I've got so far.

• Fixed a whole pile of bugs.
• Added in audio for engine thrust, which I then managed to break just before the download was put together. It's fixed now, but not in the download.
• Changed the ship icon.
• Particle effects for the asteroids themselves and when they hit the planet. I don't like the way they look, but I do like the way they function.
• While I should have done something along the lines of UI, I didn't feel like it, so I didn't do it.
• Built the framework for secondary weapons.
• Added in the first type of secondary weapons: orbital mines! When you hit Enter, they deploy at the same spot and orbit of your ship. When an asteroid gets within a certain range, it detonates, creating a shockwave. When the shockwave hits the asteroid, it destroys it. When an orbital mine hits a planet, it detonates and creates a larger shockwave (which can still destroy asteroids) but also deals a lot of damage to the planet. You only can carry 5 orbital mines in your ship. (All secondary weapons will be limited somehow.)
• I feel like I'm actually really close to a pluggable API. With a little work, I could easily make an API that would allow other people to make their own secondary weapons and other mods. I'm tempted to do that…

Day 11:

• Lots of UI refactoring. Still lots more that probably ought to be done.
• Got rid of the logo at the bottom of the screen and made it only appear when paused.
• Moved the paused menu to the middle of the screen.
• Put a border around it.
• Felt bad that it seems like all I did was shift some UI stuff around for the day, but it was a lot of work, I promise!

Day 12:

• Added the option to choose between one and two player games from the pause menu.
• The game starts with 1 player now (haven't seen that in a while, and it feels a little strange to get the full window to myself) and if you die, it also reverts back to single player.
• Some work out of the code to figure out how I'm going to structure the game setup. Nothing official to show for this yet. It's all on a whiteboard.

Day 13:

• No new screenshot. Nothing changed visually. In fact, not much changed at all today.
• Pulled the world-related generation stuff out into a separate class so that I could swap it out with different world generation algorithms without affecting the rest of the game round setup (rules, players, ships, etc.)
• Began work on parsing systems (the game world) from a file.

Day 14:

• Multiple systems defined:
  • Terra: A single medium sized planet.
  • Luna: A single medium sized planet with an orbiting small moon.
  • Gemini: Two medium-to-large planets.
  • Colossus: A single off-center gigantic planet.
• Added in a Star System selection screen, where you can choose from the above.
• Created a bunch of bugs in the mean time. Yay.

It's actually a ton of fun to play on Colossus. There's so much gravity that you and the asteroids get cruising at very fast speeds, and if you're not careful, DEATH BY COLOSSUS! I'm excited to have people play it, but it probably won't be until Sunday night when I do my normal update.

Day 15:

• Lots of cleanup of my UI framework. I do like it better now than before. (I was starting to kind of dislike it.)
• Fixed a small set of bugs that have come up from all of the refactoring I've been doing.
• Made it so the pause menu doesn't have a One/Two player option.
• Added in a screen where you can choose one or two players, which is now the starting point and also the point where you end up when you press New Game on the pause menu.

Day 16:

• You can now land on a planet if you're travelling slowly enough.
• You can take off by pressing the Fire key (Space).
• When you land, your secondary weapon refills.
• Planets can now have atmospheres. When you're in at atmosphere, the game exerts a drag effect on you, as a function of your altitude. Low altitude creates a lot of drag, high altitude at the edge of space has very little. Drag is applied to your ship and asteroids.
• If you're on course to land, the path is drawn green instead of red or white.

Day 17:

• You can now choose your input device.
  • Full Keyboard (best for 1 player): Arrow keys, Fire is Space, Secondary is Enter, Fine Tuning is Left Control
  • Player 1 Keyboard (best for two player): Arrow keys, Fire is Space, Secondary is Enter, Fine Tuning is Right Alt.
  • Player 2 Keyboard: WASD for movement, Left Control is fire, Left Shift is fine tuning, Q is secondary.
  • Xbox Game Pad: Left thumbstick to turn, left trigger to accelerate forward, A for firing, B for secondary.
• You can choose your secondary weapon.
• New secondary: Stationary Mines. Unlike the earlier orbital mines, stationary mines attempt to hold their position. Gravity might be too strong for that to happen, but it will try anyway. The eventual plan is for them to have a limited supply of fuel and to self destruct when they run out.
• Large asteroids and comets don't disappear immediately when they hit a planet or mine shockwave. They break apart into smaller pieces like when a bullet hits them. This means a mine won't instantly destroy an asteroid in all cases. Fragments might escape. And hitting a planet now behaves more like a cluster bomb with multiple impacts, and a few escapee rocks.
• You now get points when your mines destroy things.
• Mines have a chain reaction effect. A mine shockwave will trigger nearby mines as well.
• Added background music, which can be muted with F1. (Eventually it will be done in settings, not with a key press.) F2 still toggles full screen and F3 still toggles debug mode.
• You can now back up in the menu with Escape.
• Changed the background from purple to black. I'd love feedback based on the pictures, but I think the ultimate intention is to allow different levels to have different colored backgrounds. There will be variety, and probably stars and nebulae in the background at some point.
• No playable download today. I'm tired, but I should get to it tomorrow.

Day 18:

I didn't get nearly as much done today as I had hoped, but I guess that's OK, considering it's a weekday.

• New download.
• Fixed a bug where the particle effect for comets was the wrong color.
• Gave stationary mines an exhaustible fuel supply. When it runs out, it can't fight gravity anymore and begins to fall. After 2 seconds of freefall, it will self-destruct.

Day 19:

Today was mostly art.

• Added fuel to the player's ship, and it is now drawn in the UI. Landing refuels your ship.
• Added in refineries, and made the art for depots/bases. They have no functionality yet, but cities will have people (in some scenarios) refineries will have fuel, and bases will have more secondaries. In other words, you'll have to land at particular spots to pick up the supplies you need.

Day 20:

• Made it so you could only resupply fuel at refineries.
• Made it so you could only resupply secondaries at depots. This still needs some work, because different types of secondaries need to reload faster than others.

All of that could use some refinement. I'd like it if surface features like these had a large but finite supply of things. I'd also like it if depots could supply only a certain type of secondary. There may be an option to allow you to switch secondaries, or maybe if they don't match the secondary type that your ship currently supports, it's just a useless depot for you.

Day 21:

• You can now pick up passengers at cities.
• When you leave the system (the wraparound point) you score 100 points for every passenger you've got, and they're removed from your ship so you can collect more.

Day 31:

• New Download! The final one for the competition.
• I'm hoping to keep working on this game over the next couple of months, but I do have a lot of other projects that need some attention. Not the least of which is the MonoGame tutorials here.