It’s the end of day 16 and I’m finally finished with implementing guards! The feature has been three days in the making instead of the one I had hoped for and I’ve spent two or more hours a night instead of the regular one hour… The guards will probably be one of the first upgrades players can purchase in the game’s campaign mode though, so I hope the attention to detail is worth it and that this first upgrade impresses players. ...

Today I started working on the first upgrade for the player’s bunker: guards! Guards will use pistols to shoot at approaching enemies from the relative cover of the bunker door. Once I finished drawing and animating the guards it struck me that I could probably also add additional upgrades in the form of sub-machine guns and then assault rifles for the guards. This would only require a little bit of additional work for quite a bit of additional options for the player to consider. ...

Just a quick update since it’s already very, very far past my bedtime… We were away for the weekend to spend some time with our friends from Pretoria. We went to see Live and finished Pandemic Legacy (we crashed a bit harder than I would expect from such an experienced group of Pandemic players, but we also suspect the people that post their scores on the internet most likely cheated a hell of a lot :P). ...

Not a huge update today since it’s year end function today and I was working late last night to fix a last bug before getting our 2nd release after go-live into production. So when I got home I was more inclined to play Factorio with some colleagues than to work on the game. I did have time for a couple of very small changes: I added a 2nd lane of aircraft and tweaked Sas’s awesome aeroplane sounds to use positional audio with a simulated Doppler effect. ...

Day 8 is a few hours past (I miss clicked the Publish Now button) and we are now slightly more than one week into the jam. After today there will be exactly 3 weeks remaining! Progress As Sas mentioned I added damage mechanics on Day 6 and last night was scoring mechanics and an initial look at object pooling. The only features we are still missing from the basic version of Paratrooper are: ...

Today was my birthday and for extra fun we had a pilot go-live for our beta with a handful of users. It mostly worked, but it was a long day and as I sit here I am completely exhausted! I did manage to fight through an hour of almost falling asleep to work on our game. I added transport planes that drop paratroopers on the unsuspecting player. I based my image on the Boeing C-17 pictured below: ...

Between my work project go live and running around to get spoiled rotten by my wife for my imminent birthday I didn’t get much time to devote to this project today, but the 2-3 hours that I did manage were still super productive! I present to you working parachutes! This was super fun to work on! First I added the ground and wrote a script called GravityIsABitch.cs which is responsible for killing a paratrooper that collides with it at too high a velocity! ...

Now back to my regular programming: game development updates. If you are subscribed to the RSS feed prepare for daily updates for the rest of this month, because the Github GameOff 2017 started last night! Theme: Throwback The theme announced at 23:37 last night (local time) is throwback! As my cousin observed it’s a nice open theme, but I suspect most people will do the obvious thing, so this jam is likely to be remake central… Be prepared to see a lot of CGA style graphics like the banner at the top of this page! ...

This post is a bit more philosophical than my usual fare, so if you read this blog for the game development posts please feel free to skip this one… I started writing this blog post in March and it’s already October now - it’s been tough to find the courage to finish it, but I think it’s time… I don’t want my last words on this blog to be: ...

No. Not the data structure… rather a list of links to things that have been useful in game development projects in the past or may be useful in the future. This will be updated as I discover more useful links and / or when I go and groom my Chrome bookmarks list. 2D Lighting Sprite Glow Library PostProcessing Stack (needed by Sprite Glow Library) AI A* Pathfinding With Interactive Demos Design Patterns Martin Fowler on UI Architectures Game Design 7 Roguelikes Every Developer Should Study Hardware Unity Hardware Statistics Procedural Content Procedural City Generation Shaders Lux Open Source Shader Framework