I NEED TO CODE!

A little sideproject: Stalemate.
Stalemate is a turn based scifi space battle card game where you assume the role of admiral over several fleets, and battle against an opponent over the internet. A.I. is planned only when the game is entirely functional. I decided to start a simpler project that is quick to finish in concept, but even this relatively simple idea proves to be quite a lot of work. Nevertheless this is what I have achieved after about 20 hours.

There are five battle positions to station your ships in: sword fleet, flanks, support line, primary fallback and secondry backup.
You can switch fleet positions by drag and drop one fleet onto another. If you drop a fleet on an enemy fleet, it will attack that fleet if possible.
Fleets in short range are sword fleets and flanks, they can always battle eachother. The other positions are long range, and can only attack or be attacked by fleets that have the "long range" ability.
There are a number of other abilities, each giving a fleet an edge in combat. Some abilities negate others, like Jamming prevents hits from long range. Others boost shields or increase firepower.

Yet to do is actually attacking, victory screen and hiscores, intro screen, tutorial, lobby and start match with ship selection. Whew.

Meanwhile still working on Spacetrader3k, update about custom animations comming soon!

Oh yeah, credits where credits due:
Ship models by SolCommand.com: http://www.solcommand.com

What's this? Another project? Yes! Naturally I started anew once more.

Spacetrader3k is a trading simulation game on Android. The player can create new contracts consisting of a ship, cargo and two planets where the ship will transport its cargo inbetween: loading, travelling, unloading, and over again. Every succesful transit will give you money to start new ship research and buy more contracts for more ships. As time (or actually cycles) passes, certain events will take place. Ships can get hijacked, damaged, stranded, adrift, raided, as well as boosted, attract investors, find treasures and unlock new travelsites.

I have put the focus on creating nifty looks on the technical side (in Java and making smart use of XML). The XML part of Android is still a bit confusing, but the Java side goes a lot better since my last project (see previous post) where I managed to screw up the project with a web of threads and heavy interfaces. I learned, and this game runs a lot more smooth now. The tough part ahead is implementing fun and challenging game mechanics, but it's also one of the most fun parts to do. So await a new update soon...

Show your support and leave a comment!

The Ludum Dare competition is over and the results have been published! I did not end up in any noticeable ranking list (not that I expected that), but it has been a great trip. I learned quite a lot from the contest regarding gamedesign and cutting out a lot of awesome features. But after the submission deadline I haven't been sitting still either. I collected all the feedback and made a version 0.2 of The Plague.

Download version 0.2 of The Plague here!

Screenshot!

Feature list:

• Bit of control for your minion hoards: by using CTRL around a claimable area you can position your current minion swarm to that area. Press CTRL on the claim-spot to recollect them.
• New minions: skellies and shadow beasts.
• New enemies: pest doctor, villagers (they are affraid of you) and wolves.
• Disease stops spreading, a potential next version will contain ways of conquering the whole land by sacrificing minions to construct dark towers to expand your diseased realm.
• Zoomed in about 50% so graphics are better visible on large resolution screens too.
• Updated colours to match better (but colours are still a hard thing to properly balance for me).
• More sprites and graphical details.

Have fun playing and I'd be honoured to receive some feedback from you!

Joozey

Got a workflow in photoshop to create planets quickly... well... non-earthly planets that is.

First planet, Fae Terra, took about 3 hours, the rest only 15 minutes. Naturally I wanted an earth-like planet too, boy was that a pain to create. Many hours later searching tutorials, textures and fiddling around with colours I got a result I was fairly happy with.

I tried to find a process using effects primarily that results in a planet where continents are separate shapes on the texture, match the ocean they drift in and look fairly realistic. For every planet you need some manual tweaking with the clone pencil and random strokes, blur and smudge to give more story to it, but the amount of manual work on the earth planets is much, much more than on the other planets without continents. After the continents looked good enough (for the time I spent on it), I did the clouds. These went a lot easier with a proper brush to create the sheepy clouds, and strokes + smudge to create the bigger bands. I could have player more with depth, but I really needed to finish it up.

Credits due where credits due: all textures I used came from texturez.com. Free concrete and stone textures to define the surface of the planets.

For the Ludum Dare competition #25, I created a game called The Plague.

Download link of The Plague (LD #25 entry) is here!

Ludum Dare is a gamedev competition event. In 48 hours you have to create a game, and every aspect of it (including code, music, sound and graphics). The event revolves around a theme chosen by the community. This time: "You are the villain". With that theme in mind I spent all saturday not creating any game. So, that saturday evening I sat down and started to code. Code line after line. Debugging and cursing. Redesigning, breaking my head, more swearing and more bad art. Now, sunday night, half an hour before the deadline, I finished. It took me about 12 hours, and here is the final result.

I hope you enjoy the little game, I had to cut out so much more awesome ideas, and had to do the less awesome ones to make it playable enough. There is no real ending, just try to convert the entire lands to that lovely stinking miasma full of rotten corpses and mindless minions.