GreenSlimeGames

Just a quick update for today, as rather busy with rl alas.  Harvester’s now have a gui when you right click them.  This was primarily because every time I accidentally right clicked ( and called a flying ship ) on accident on them ( when I was trying to move them ) –  I was getting annoyed.  So now a menu appears.  You will also notice you can fix harvesters.  The small black pixels on the animation are meant to represent the crew getting out and fixing it.  The amount fixed is random, but will have a set a cost ( it is free at the moment ).  More experienced crews will have a higher chance of fixing damage – there is a harvester upgrade system now in place, but it has no gui, so you will just have to wait for that 🙂

Once the harvester experience system is in place, I think I’m going to move onto the hardest part … base building 🙂

A bunch of small bugs fixed today.  And added some performance tweaking for when things that are not in screen – all boring and can’t show you anything as the tweaks are inherently invisible 🙂  So what did I add that was visible?  well firstly a new environmental effect.  Sand is blown randomly around the screen.  I’m not sure if I like it or not – even though there is a wind that changes randomly to determine spawn rates of sand particles – it does just look like a drawing bug.  If I can get dunes looking nice and 3d it may work nicely – but not very into it at the moment – let me know what you think 🙂  Second thing I can show you is “Orange Blows”.  Basically a concentration of orange is produced and grows … gradually this Orange Pre-Mass gets to a point where if a harvester travels over it, it will explode, spreading orange everywhere!

As you can see the harvester takes damage whenever this happens, but it means that there is more orange to harvest.  The orange must flow! 🙂  I manually spawned these lumps in, they actually occur ‘naturally’ when there is less than 40% of the orange to mine.  They can spawn anywhere, and don’t appear on the minimap – so it is worthwhile to seek them, as your harvester can mine even when you think all the orange is gone 🙂

^^ WIP adviser – which shows that scaling 32×32 rl pictures really doesn’t make for good artwork … I’m also working on the title screen atm, as think I have finally decided on a name 🙂

Must be a reason for such a huge star-field 🙂

[Lots of animated GIFs today, page may be slow to load]

So today I added a minimap 🙂  It shows harvesters, carrying ships and worms.  The world is huge compared to the viewport ( 1000×1000 vs 32×32 ) so I needed a way to navigate around it.  The minimap helps towards this.  The dark green represents where you are viewing in the world.  The blue are harvester; the cool thing about that is the harvesters flash between two different blues to show they are harvesting.  If they ain’t flashing you either need to call in a carrying ship, or move them to some orange to harvest.

The map doesn’t consume the total screen on purpose … you can still move the camera around on it and see how you are moving, the one pixel hint helps in deciding location :).  Grey represents the giant carrying ship, it is now spawned at your base rather than near the harvester.  Now when you right click on the harvester –  it makes its way to the harvester, picking it up, taking it to base, getting some funds then returning it.  The flashing purple light is dropped to show where a harvester is picked up from :

After playing around with the minimap and moving around, I decided I needed a way to move faster.  Navigation is done with the arrow keys atm, holding shift moves you five pixels instead of one – which makes a huge speed increase :

The rapid movement caused is by holding shift while moving arrow keys, slow movement is just arrow keys.  And that is about all for now.  Adding a minimap actually helped with debugging:  I noticed harvesters stopped harvesting when off screen, due to a miscalculation based upon location.  So this really helped with that.  That is all for now folks 🙂

Wow, pretty much a wasted day spent pixel arting.  And it still looks pants.  But anway, yes, today I spent all my dev time trying to get the pickup and drop harvester animation looking a little better.  It’s pretty tricky to say the least.

I’ve played around with lifting the harvester from the ground to the flying ship – it looks a lot better ( as no blurry pixels ) however, this really doesn’t show what I want it too, but does look better, artistic vision vs  actual drawing skills debate I guess 🙂  I’m going to shelve this for tomorrow, and just leave it as is for now, otherwise will spend a lot of dev tweaking something that really doesn’t make that much difference to the game.  There is a lot left to do and the time is rapidly vanishing … d’oh.

One of the things I want to work on is a minimap – showing where about in the 5000×5000 pixel world your harvesters are located in – on a 32×32 screen.  Should be, errm, interesting 🙂

Not a long post today, as I’m up very early tomorrow, so must sleep and dream up more gamedev ideas 🙂  The above is a complete system whose animation is very very very much a work in progress.  Honestly, its terrible, I may have bitten off more than I can chew artistically 🙂  The right click to sell was always a temporary mechanic, this is much more of a fleshed out system.  On right click your harvester summons a giant flying ship to come and pick it up.  It’s currently spawned just off screen, but this carrying flying ship is designed to come from a home base – which will come later.  It picks up your harvester and flies it off screen, and the harvesters tank is emptied, and funds given.

It then returns to were the harvester requested pick up, and plonks the harvester back on the dunes.  Requesting a pickup ( with a right click ) causes the harvester to stop everything, which may be useful if a worm is nearby 🙂  The blood splat is being used a debugging system here, I’m going to change it to a flashing beacon.

Just a heads up – there won’t be a post tomorrow due to real life commitments, but the work shall be continuing 🙂

And one last thing : a massive massive thank you to all my twitter followers : I’m getting a lot of re-tweets and favourites and feedback.  I love it.  It really helps keep me motivated – seeing that my work is being noticed and appreciated is really what keeps any indie going and you guys and girls are great at it!

[WIP! Honest! I mean it! Don’t judge meeeee!]