Empires of the Black Sun, Round 2017-2

Summary:

The thread for the game I'm working on, a continuation of the Space Invaders clone with RPG elements.

Empires of the Black Sun, Round 2017-2

PiscesMike 28 May 2017 07:55

So, my overall goal for the year is to publish a game. I decided to go with the Empires of the Black Sun game since it's the one my niece loved the most.

I spent the first competition on this project, and plan to spend the next two as well to get things really polished up before release. At any rate, by the end of the last round I had done a tremendous amount of planning, and had developed a pretty decent object design. That's basically something that's always evolving but I did spend some extra time smoothing out the rough spots.

The only renderable component from the last competition was the player ship that could move back and forth. It wasn't a lot to show for all the planning that went into things, so hopefully this round we'll have some nice gameplay worked out.

As a last note, my competition dates will vary a little from the *official* times. I work Friday-Tuesdays, and my days off are Wednesdays and Thursdays. So, three more days for me and the weekend begins! Whoot Whoot!

So, for this competition my personal list of goals is as follows:

• First and foremost, spend 30 minutes 5 days a week working on the game. I've had an issue with this recently, as life has been a little staggering.
• Track the time spent on the project in a billable hours format, including various departments (Art, Sound, Programming hours)
• Add Enemies to the renderable components
• Add Bullets to the renderable components
• Add a background to the renderable components
• Find or create royalty free artwork for the galactic sector selection menu (I loved the original one, and haven't hit any IP infringements from it, but still haven't been able to determine if it is public domain. That needs to be resolved before an actual release)
• Establish basic game play mechanics
• Add some Kevin McLeod
• Rework the tech tree based on a level up paradigm
• Implement a resource gathering and management system
• Create basic enemy AI
• Add a basic scripting system

I guess that is about it. Having a playable demo for this round seems like a decent, if not ambitious goal!

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"May the mercy of His Divine Shadow fall upon you." - Stanley H. Tweedle, Security Guard class IV, The League of 20,000 planets

Last edited on 30 May 2017 03:07 by PiscesMike Show more

Re: Empires of the Black Sun, Round 2017-2

rbwhitaker 03 Jun 2017 03:37

I like the idea of tracking time on the project. It adds a little overhead, but it would definitely be useful to be able to look back and say, "This game took X hours, and Y% of it was art, Z% was level design," etc. It definitely gives you some numbers to work with for future games.

I hope your first goal is treating you well so far, in the few days that you've been going for. The rest of life can definitely expand to fill up all time available to it, but I think a minimum of 30 minutes a day, 5 of 7 days is most likely doable for almost everybody. Sometimes you have to fight tooth and nail to defend just a little bit of time to keep a project like this moving forward.

Re: Empires of the Black Sun, Round 2017-2

Brett208 03 Jun 2017 20:04

I would be a little scared to add up all the time I've spent programming on a game. Looking forward to seeing the progress PiscesMike!

Re: Empires of the Black Sun, Round 2017-2

PiscesMike 04 Jun 2017 09:11

Thanks guys!

I've got to say though, that I've been missing that first goal pretty consistently. Maybe even entirely.

Ok, fine. I haven't even started yet.

Wednesday was supposed to be my start, but thanks to some life events (still dinking around with the wife's vehicle) things just didn't work out that way. Sorry to formulate the thought and put it into words, but having a running car is more important at this point than game programming.

That isn't to say that game programming isn't important, or that I've been completely useless. I did manage to get some design stuff done, and even a basic project laid out. The big thing is I did not log my times or get anything that renders (yet). So that doesn't count.

Having said that, when I was working on the design stuff I kind of decided that I'm going to go with Monogame this round. This will be my first Monogame attempt. I don't think I consciously made that final until yesterday or today. So there was some trepidation there about how to proceed. Now that I'm throwing my hat into the Monogame ring, things should actually move a little faster. (If only I can get the danged content manager to build!)

I'm going to compromise between my ambition and my laziness and proclaim I'm 3/5 on my goal of 30 mins 5 days a week. That would be approximate on the time I've spent this week (Wed-Sat) of 1.5 hours. IF I can squeeze in a round tomorrow then I'll be at 4/5 and that isn't horrible. I'll only miss my goal by 1/5 and that seems easy enough to make up next week especially if life cuts me some slack. To that end, I'm going to work really hard (already got the last part for the wife's car) to make that happen. If I can actually get a day off I can spend some serious time on my project. Wed will be the last day I spend on the car if it's not done by then so Thursday should be a good day!

Alrighty, take care all. I'll be at the 9-5 for the next 48 so unless you are up late tomorrow night I might not see you before my weekend!

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"May the mercy of His Divine Shadow fall upon you." - Stanley H. Tweedle, Security Guard class IV, The League of 20,000 planets

Re: Empires of the Black Sun, Round 2017-2

Brett208 05 Jun 2017 07:05

Sorry to hear about the tough luck with your wife's car. Hopefully it all smooths out this coming week!

I think you are making the right choice to switch to MonoGame. The longer you wait, the larger your code base will be for porting. While porting isn't too difficult from XNA to MonoGame, I'm certain there will be a couple of issues to work through. It took me a while to get all my content building as well.

There is still that outstanding bug in SpriteFont that you helped me track down. I also had some difficulty getting dll references to work with content.mgcb. In retrospect it is fairly simple, but I guess my mind wasn't looking at it right.

-Brett

Re: Empires of the Black Sun, Round 2017-2

PiscesMike 09 Jun 2017 18:08

Well, not a whole lot to show. Did get some decent progress in this week so here's a short video…

As far as my stated goal go:

• First week I made 4/5 on 30 minutes a day. This week I hit the 5/5, although pretty much all of both were in one day sessions. Life's still a little crazy atm, so I'm counting it anyways!
• So far, all my project time has been spend on actual coding, so that is easy enough to track: 4.5 hours coding.
• I did finally get a background rendering, so that one is done as well. Still going to need some work as it's only about 1/10th of what I want to do with backgrounds, but I didn't really specify anything other than add a background, so it counts as well!

I guess this week's goals will be enemies, enemy AI, bullets, and music. Those will be fairly simple to knock out before the harder stuff kicks in. So I guess during my last week I'll have to bust butt to hit my goals for the competition.

Good luck all on your projects!

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"May the mercy of His Divine Shadow fall upon you." - Stanley H. Tweedle, Security Guard class IV, The League of 20,000 planets

Last edited on 09 Jun 2017 18:59 by PiscesMike Show more

Re: Empires of the Black Sun, Round 2017-2

PiscesMike 19 Jun 2017 06:24

Wow. 10 days since my last post.

I've been making progress here and there. Life is still crazy, as it always is.

I did sneak in enough time to get some work done on world space. It's a little new for me, I always thought I'd be enumerating modes and whatnot, but it's been good so far.

Don't really have a video at this point, but I'm hoping to get it out before the end of (my) week three. My weekend schedule is a little off from normal, so I run alternate days to most people.

Hope everyone is doing well on your projects! See you in Discord!

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"May the mercy of His Divine Shadow fall upon you." - Stanley H. Tweedle, Security Guard class IV, The League of 20,000 planets

Re: Empires of the Black Sun, Round 2017-2

PiscesMike 28 Jun 2017 04:22

8 days since last post this time. Getting a little better!

Sooooo. I've still been tinkering with worldspace trying to get this a little better. It's an evolution as always.
That being said, I seem to have found a system(s) that I feel will work well and be able to be used in future projects. It's becoming clearer for me and that's always a good thing.

I'm going to go ahead and do a little review of my progress so far. Technically I'm still in week four, and specifically, I have until Thursday to finish up. I don't think I'll hit all my goals but should be close.

Goal #1: Spend 30 minutes 5 days a week working on my project. I'd say I hit that at about 75%. Sometimes that has come in the form of a lot in one day, but I've also spent time while at work on design and some pseudo code.

Goal #2: Track time spend in a billable hours format. This I did not hit at all. I don't know why this seems so hard of late. I did it on several projects before but just can't seem to get in the habit of logging my start times, so all I have is a rough estimate based on goal #1.

Goal #3: Add Enemies to the renderable components - Plan to get this done over the next few days. I wanted to make sure I had my worldspace issues worked out before I got too in depth with so many renderable components.

Goal #4: Add Bullets to the renderable components - see #3 above.

Goal #5: Add a background to the renderable components. This one I did get done in a minimalist way. I wanted to have a series of backgrounds that can be changed in and out anytime needed. I ended up with only the one, starry background for the moment, but the framework is set up in such a manner that I can just pop in the new ones whenever I get around to creating them.

Goal #6: Find or create royalty free artwork for the galactic sector selection menu (I loved the original one, and haven't hit any IP infringements from it, but still haven't been able to determine if it is public domain. That needs to be resolved before an actual release) - I haven't made any progress on this one at all, as I have been concentrating on the game play screen.

Goal #7: Establish basic game play mechanics - Not there yet, as this is dependent on adding the enemies and bullets. Should get done over my weekend, by Thursday.

Goal #8: Add some Kevin McLeod - Again, not there yet. This is a simple one though and will get done in the next few days

Goals #9-#12: Rework the tech tree based on a level up paradigm
Implement a resource gathering and management system
Create basic enemy AI
Add a basic scripting system

With the exception of basic enemy AI, I don't think those will get done.

At any rate, that is where I am at the moment and we'll see how things are on Thursday!

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"May the mercy of His Divine Shadow fall upon you." - Stanley H. Tweedle, Security Guard class IV, The League of 20,000 planets