The game is still not done. Getting close though!
Most of this week was spent working on the dogfighting game, but I also streamed the making of two Pico-8 doodles and I created a font!
Here are the two doodles I made this week:
As I just wrote above, these were done on live-stream. My last attempts at live-streaming went ok but not super great, both because I wasn’t sure of what I was doing and because I didn’t have a proper microphone for this, which meant the sound was never set up correctly. But now, I have a whole new and shiny micro-phone and the sound setup seems pretty good! I still don’t really know what I’m doing but that’s ok, I think it’s going pretty well anyway!
So yeah, if you want to stream, I definitely recommend having a good microphone. Mine is a Blue Snowball microphone which I was told is of very good quality for its rather low price. And I’m very happy to say that I could afford it thanks to the kind people supporting me on Patreon! 😀
I’m going to be streaming much more often from now on, so I hope to see you in the chat sometime at twitch.tv/trasevol_dog! For now, the streams will happen when I have time and something interesting to develop, but I’d like to make it a regular thing at some point, I just need to find a day that works well for that!
So maybe you remember the 2D dogfighting game that I was working on last week and that I said should be done by this week-end. Well… it’s not done yet. 😡
I’m gonna write about the reasons why afterwards but first, here’s the progress that was done:
- Added a sort of mini-boss enemy that will certainly give you problems once you get far enough in the game.
- Reiterated on the player/enemy ships balance about 9999 times.
- Made the bullets bigger, faster and slower.
- Added a black hole that gives you ships when you reach it and only appears when you don’t have many ships left.
- Reworked the spawn system to make it more interesting than just throwing lots of enemies on the player.
- Reworked the camera.
- Limited the playable area vertically and made it wrap around horizontally.
- Optimized stuff.
- Added black smoke on ships being very damaged and on defeated ships.
- Added a discreet skull effect on ship death.
- Created a font for the game.
I’m probably forgetting a few things but that’s what comes to mind at the moment. Here’s the latest gif of the game:
I have yet to get started on menus and sound but since there’s not much more left to do, that should be the main focus this week! I’m not gonna give a release date again because it seems I’m not very good at it. This week though.
Quickly about that font that I made! The font is called Pico-16 and it is inspired by the Pico-8 font, except it’s twice as large. It’s a monospace font and has two versions with different spacing between the letters. I’ve been wanting to make my first font for a long time and I needed one that would go well with the tiny Pico-8 font for the game, so I made this Pico-16 font! You can download it for free and use it in whatever creation you see it fit for!
So why didn’t the game get out this week-end? Truth is, reworking the spawn system and the camera were two important tasks and there were not very appealing to me, reworking systems is generally pretty intimidating even though it’s generally not that bad. On the other hand, I had recently bought the game Okhlos and I wanted to see how good it was. And I’m still not sure. The game is definitely a good game but I feel like it could be much better if not for some clunky design decisions. So I’m still playing it and having a pretty good time with it but also finding things that don’t feel quite right to me. But I digress.
Basically, the motivation got a bit down, especially as I was very tired due to progressively switching my work rhythm from night to day which, let’s just say I’m halfway through it and feeling confident about the second half. I took some time to rest this week-end and I feel much better already.
What let me get back into wanting to finish this game though, was adding new things. Namely the black smoke and the skull effect. Adding things to a game is important to me because it’s the best type of changes in my opinion. It makes me feel like I’m moving on with the game and it lets me have new things to show to people.
So in the end, the solution was to rest and then adding cool stuff to the game!
That is all for this week! It’s been an OK week.
Next week, the stars will finally align and I’ll finish the dogfighting game, I’ll stream some game and doodle development and also, this hasn’t been announced yet but I’ll be presenting a Pico-8 beginner workshop for ResistJam, live on their Youtube channel, on Thursday, at 15:00 GMT! The whole thing will be recorded and posted again as a video afterwards but if you want to be able to interact and ask questions, you should try to be there for the stream! And there will be Pico-8 doodles!
Have a great week!
Take care!
TRASEVOL_DOG
* TRASEVOL_DOG * 
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