Dev Diary

No work done today. I spent the day with my friends trying out some new board games at the Timeless board game party. That said I did want to post an update video quickly as our last couple of screenshot updates didn’t quite do justice how awesome the game looks now with the bombs raining down around your bunker: Michelle unfortunately has to work all weekend, so the Sunday part of board games were cancelled, which means I’ll have some time to work on the game today. ...

This is a very belated Day 22 update post. Sas put up a merge request for bombs a couple of days ago, but there were still quite a few bugs and missing bits from how I envisioned it, so I switched gears from building UI to trying to help out with bombs. Bombs were a bitch! I estimate I’ve spent about 8 hours working on bombs since I started looking at them on Tuesday evening, so I’m now quite far behind in terms of building the shop UI and figuring out how to set up level progression… We’re also doing boardgames again this weekend since our friends are almost heading off for a holiday in December, so I’m not likely to have much time to catch up this weekend. ...

I was working until about 01:00 or 02:00 on Sunday morning to get everything in the Day 18 update done, so I ended up not getting a hell of a lot done on Sunday… It was mostly just sleeping and winning at Fortnite Battle Royale for the first time - Sas died early in that particular game, so he was the little angel on my shoulder saying - run don’t fight! ...

This update is a bit late due to an unplanned CS: GO game followed by an unplanned “just one more ticket” after that (it was about 23:00 or 23:30 when the match ended). I have had an amazingly productive Saturday! I started working on the ticket to turn enemy soldiers into a plausible threat to the player’s bunker. The first step (or so I thought at the time), was to start animating the soldiers so they can walk towards the bunker instead of sliding towards it: ...

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: ...