#mecha jam

[squaredev]

Okay this is (almost) it. The game is feature-complete, has sound effects, music (although I will replace it if the musicbro who contacted me makes it in time), moderate levels of juice, and most of all, functional.

Of course I haven’t tested it nearly enough and the difficulty is probably off the charts since I placed a bunch of enemies seemingly at random, but that’s okay. I’ll fix that in the next couple of days.

As much fun as I had making this, I’m happy to be close to done with it; now I can move on and make something else. No idea what though.

[squaredev]

Some progress. I made a new weapon system (though it’s only new code-wise, so there’s not much visual difference). There are 3 weapon types:

automatic: shoots continuously as long as you hold the button. But if you keep shooting for too long the weapon will ‘overheat’ and you’ll have to wait a bit before you can shoot again

burst: shoots a burst of bullets (one or more) when you press the fire button. This will be used by the enemies

charge shot: as the name suggest, you hold the button to charge, release to shoot

I’m still in the process of re-implementing the weapons for the enemies.

Another thing to note is that while in the webm the charge shot weapon is a missile launcher, it’s just for testing. The actual weapon will probably be a beam shooter. I do, however, plan to give the player the ability to shoot missiles, but I want to make it cooler by having missile launchers come out of the mecha’s shoulder pads.

Also not shown in the webm but I’ve coded a couple of messages that display if you get too far from your current objective. After the first message is displayed, if you still keep getting farther away, you will get a game over.

Lastly, big thanks to the anon who provided the awesome character portraits to replace the placeholders I had before.

[squaredev]

mecha shooter

So yeah, it’s kind of late but I released my Mecha Jam game on itch.io like 2-3 weeks ago now? If you haven’t already, give it a try if you want. It’s nothing exceptional, far from it, but I had fun making it.

[squaredev]

Another not very substantial progress post but hey, the game is almost done so there’s not much else to show.

Made a primitive system to hide the objects that obstruct the view between the camera and the player. It’s not pretty but it works.

I made some more enemies (though they’re basically reskin of previous ones): 

a fast walker type that shoots weaker bullets. I think I’ll also make an alt version that shoots missiles though;

a turret that shoots from 3 vertically aligned barrels;

a sniper turret that has a very big view radius and shoots stronger bullets but at a much slower rate. I need to tweak its rotation speed though.

finally the only actually new enemy type is a small ‘kamikaze’ bot that doesn’t attack per se but will try to get close to you before blowing itself up.

Thanks to anon’s advice, I fixed the collision problem I was having (basically having the mecha phasing through the buildings).

Oh right, I also made the ‘missile launchers coming out the shoulder pads’ thing I mentioned time and time again. It looked cooler in my mind but whatever. However I need to tweak the missile behavior a bit. Right now, when a missile is shots, it looks for the nearest target to home in to. This means that when I shoot out 4 missiles from roughly the same position, they will all target the same object, which in  turn makes all but one of them useless since they will make each other explode, and only one explosion will actually damage the target. So I’ll have to add some randomization to the target choice and to the movement towards it.

Now the only thing left to add is the dash/boost thing. I keep putting it off for some reason.

Shit I can’t believe I spent so much time on this game, I plan to complete it in 2 weeks or so. Oh well, it’s been fun and I learned a lot so it’s all good.

[squaredev]

I finally lost my editor script virginity!

I made a simple script to quickly lay out the buildings that will compose the city in the game. Yeah, the models themselves still suck but I’ll redo them eventually. Also played around with shaders, lighting, post process etc even though it’s way too early for it. Oh and I implemented pooling for bullet objects and the particle effects that play when hitting something (not shown in the webm).

There are still many things to fix and add, like finally checking for collisions with buildings and ground while flying.

In the end, the game will basically flow like this:

land at designated location

complete objective (defeat all enemies, pick up item/s, accompany NPC to destination?)

receive new objective

fly to it (while defeating flying enemies and flying through rings ala Starfox)

rinse and repeat until the final boss

I’m having some troubles thinking how to limit the player from staying in flying form all the time.

Update: turns out Tumblr did upload the correct video but took some time to update the post. I deleted the other post.

[squaredev]

mecha jam here we fucking go

[squaredev]

Progress! Dialogue is implemented. I need to tweak it a bit but it works.

Eventually I'll add character portraits on the left side (replacing the black square). 

[squaredev]

In my effort to post more often, here’s the first bit of progress for my mecha jam game. You can move, strafe (badly) while aiming, shoot 2 different weapons (you don’t actually shoot anything yet, I only set up the animations) and transform into your plane form and fly around (badly).