jdnx429

One month before the deadline for the contest and I’m still pushing away.  However, I do not think I will make the deadline. If the contests are quarterly as mentioned, then the next deadline would be the end of April so I’ll probably submit it under that contest.

Basically, I don’t want to rush the game and since this is something I do in my spare time I don’t want to feel like this is something that I HAVE to do. I want to do it because I enjoy it, not because it’s a job.  So starting today, I’m not going to let myself feel constrained by the deadline and work on the game at a pace I feel comfortable with.

This last week, during some downtime around the holidays I made a lot of progress on the backgrounds. Originally I meant to have backgrounds from many of the islands around Hawaii, but then I realized I would have needed to use other people’s pictures or free stock photography and I didn’t want to do that.

Besides, on my last trip to Hawaii, I took a few thousand pictures and made many panoramas that could serve as stage backgrounds. These were all taken around Oahu so the title of the game could more accurately be called “Aliens over Oahu” but I really like the name “Aliens over Hawaii”.

Out of all the panoramas I made, I originally selected 15 which are shown below. However, only 8 made it into the final game. There are two reasons for that. One, if I had placed all 15 panoramas, the game would have been about 5 MB in size, a bit too large. And two, some of the backgrounds just don’t fit well with the others.

In the game, each of these is 7000 pixels long by 500 pixels high and they’re Oilified so that the focus is on the foreground- the player and the enemies. It’ll take about 6-7 minutes to fly through each stage.

The next big push is working on the enemies. Considering that I have to fill at least 48 minutes of side-scrolling action I want to make sure that there are a nice variety of enemies and that the bosses are fun to beat. In addition, I have to make sure that all the enemy groups are balanced across the four difficulty levels in terms of size, experience, speed, etc. That will probably take about 3-4 weeks since I mainly work on the game during the weekend. However, this is probably my favorite part of coding the game so far.

We’ll see how it goes from here.

With today’s release, players will now be able to get change back for purchases in Bars. This only applies to items listed in Coins, though.

Previously, an item that is listed at 500 Coins could be bought for either 1 Bar or 500 Coins.  However 1 Bar is considerably more expensive than 500 Coins so it made more sense to buy items in Coins for cheap items. As of today, players buying that 500 Coin item with 1 Bar will receive about 5400 Coins in change.  I’m not sure how this will affect the Coin/Bar Ratio but we’ll see how it develops.

On occasion, I see large jump in the Ratio, which you can see in the graph. Usually they coincide with new releases so I’m not entirely sure what’s going on behind the scenes.

However, I did notice one rather odd thing today. For the first time ever, I saw the Coin/Bar Ratio go down! At roughly 5:00 p.m., it was at 5941 Coins per Bar. When I rechecked about an hour later it was down to 5940. I know it’s only one Coin but it’s the only time I’ve seen it go down. However, I don’t check the ratio every hour so it may have gone down many times before but I just haven’t noticed. I’ll keep an eye out and see what happens in the next few days.

Well progress on ‘Aliens Over Hawaii’ is still a bit slower than I expected. However, this last weekend I played a full playthrough of the game. However, at this point the game consisted of 3 short stages avoiding missiles and fighting very simple bosses with one static background.   Still, nearly all of the framework details are done -  transitions between stages, weapon leveling,  damage and explosion details,  dying and restarting at checkpoints,  difficulty levels, etc.

There really are 4 big things I need to work right now before the game can be listed:

Enemies: The game currently has 6 different types of missile groups. I need to add lots more enemy types and groups to make a fun game. I also have to create the bosses at the end of the stage.

Backgrounds: I have yet to formally select where each of the stages will take place, but I know that at least one stage will take place in Waimea Canyon, another in Kaaawa Valley and most likely the final stage will be on the big Island at Mauna Loa.

Music&Sound Effects: This will probably be very simple. There might be a boss theme and maybe 30 second song at the beginning of each stage or checkpoint. However, I’ll have to probably use the Whirled Datapack to bring them into the game in order to avoid making the game too big.  I’ll probably have limited sound effects as well - I imagine that an explosion sound will become quickly annoying quickly the first 100 enemies are killed before the first checkpoint of the first stage.

Whirled: Drawing up all the trophies and coding them into the game.  Making sure that progress is saved at the end of each stage and that stats are being tracked.