Some silouettes...

Started to draw a plane in isometric view and found out 2 things.

1. I suck at perspective, and symmetry
2. The plane will be shown from above 99% of the time, why bother with a technical sketch from an angle that will never be used, and is tough as nails to make?

So I started to draw some silhouettes instead, since the shape is more important, and gives a quicker result.

Why must I always make things so hard? :-P

A brave new world...

So here we go. My very first blog post ever...kinda sad, but you gotta start somewhere.

So as a game developer by day, and hobby game developer at night, there is always a project that needs attention. In all honesty it would be more fair to say projects, cause it seems that there are always more than one. And as with most hobby game developers no project seems to be able to complete.

Thinking about this I realized that this is because once you start on a project it starts small and 15 minutes later it seems to have grown to the scope of a AAA title. I also realized that I spent loads of times coding in a lot of structure into the projects. This is of course very nice, but it takes a lot of time from the actual coding of gameplay which is really what you want to work with.

Soooooo....With these very deep thoughts in mind I came up with a new one: I am just going to create a small shoot em up game in 2D, and I want to do it fast, focusing on gameplay. I also understood that for this to be done, the code would probably not be very pretty and that I would have to expect and accept it.

So with all this in mind....I started in the completely wrong end planning loads of features, GUI components, mucking about in Photoshop to get a better understanding of the look and feel of the game...*sigh*

That was until Daniel asked me if I shouldn't be working on gameplay instead of doodling around with things that could be sorted out later. Which of course was totally true.

soooooo....I started to check around for some inspirations for the shoot em up and I started to code the basics.

The current aim is to develop a proof of concept build that includes all the core gameplay, the shoot em it self (there are 1000 other ideas surrounding it...but lets ignore that for now). This means that I will actually have to spend some time creating some editors and tools, which is not really gameplay, but they are essential since I don't really want to hard code enemy movement, level setup and so on. The tools will have very basic features and functionality, only enough to support the development of the POC build.

Earlier I have implemented a basic player ship, enemies (moving about and firing), a few player weapons and the basic structure. The game will be running at a native resolution of 1280*720. Since it is a shoot em up the vertical resolution is the key here. People will still be able to play the game on higher resolutions since the actual game field area will only be 540*720. In effect if your hardware can display 1024x768 you will be able to play the game.

I am currently working on getting the basic features into the weapon editor. It has fundamental features now, but I need to add a few vital bits of pieces before I can leave it. I will update you on my work in the next blog post.

So, there you have it: My very first blog post containing lots of information that no one will ever read, but hey! That's bloggin' for ya!