These two weeks have been pretty hectic!
The first week, I was supposed to finish BotJuice! (or at least make it feature-complete, ready for testing, balancing etc)
I did quite a lot on that front, starting with handmade maps!
I wrote a quick script in Pico-8 to format the maps that I would draw in the spritesheet, into a string containing a lua table.
Of the 16 maps I made, 6 are 4-players maps, 6 again are 2-players maps, and 4 are 3-players.
The 3-players maps were the most difficult to design, because the board tiles happen to be four-sided. I’ve kept to pretty simple designs though, trying to put a focus on areas that are more defendable than others. Most of the maps have corridors and more open areas, some have obstacles, and some have multiple parallel paths.
Once I was happy with the maps, I wrote the map parsing code in BotJuice, as well as the code to deliver the map from server to client over the network. A map being a simple table of numbers, this went rather smooth.
Finally I wrote a tiling algorithm for the new tile graphics, which I would do again a few days later, with better tile graphics.
And I did the title art for the game! I’m really happy with this one. I love the change of texture between ‘Bot’ and ‘Juice’, I think it makes it super fun.
In-game the ‘Juice’ part of the title is grey until you get connected to the server, then it takes the color you’ll have as a player. Later I even added a way to get a new color (the server attributes them, so that everyone sees the same colors), which will update both the logo and the minimap that is in the lobby.
Other smaller changes and additions include unit exploding on death and scorch marks on the ground, player names attributed with the player colors, better sprites for the ground, better behavior when a unit gets attacked, and player names being shown when you put your cursor on a unit.
And finally I made and used the sound effects! No music for now, but I might try and make one sometime soon.
And then the game was feature-complete! So I passed it over to the Castle team for a first pass of testing! Which gave me crashes to fix and clarifications to make! Which were going to be for later, because first…
I needed to join up Eliott on making a mod of Wasteland Standoff!
At first we wanted to make a completely new game, but we only had the one week to make the game, so we decided to go with something safer! (which would end up taking more than one week anyway)
We’ve taken Wasteland Standoff, our one-week minimalist competitive shooter, and tried to make something a little more intricate with it! With hit points! And different weapons! And destructible terrain! And AI enemies! And a crown that defines your score! And a whole new palette of colors! (this one)
Once again, Eliott has been taking care of most of the code, while I worked on the spritesheet and made some changes in the code to use the new palette, and also map-related code!
Eliott actually started working on this project on Monday, while I was still working on BotJuice, and so I could only join him on Wednesday. Still, and even though the game is not quite finished yet, we’re pretty happy with what we’ve done!
The main missing elements are one or two more weapons, the randomization of weapon drops, randomization of enemy spawn, the lifebar and ammo count, the map, maybe a minimap, and some polish here and there.
All in all, we’re expecting to finish it all in the start of the week, with a public release Wednesday or Thursday.
And this week I’ll also be working on making small changes to BotJuice to make it better before the public release which will probably happen next week.
Both BotJuice and Jardins Du Standoff will be playable soon on Castle for free! (actually BotJuice already is, it just hasn’t been announced publicly yet :X)
And finally, this last week-end, I’ve moved into a new apartment with my partner, which is cool and exciting! It also means that this week I won’t be working as much as usual, I’ll be adventuring in our new city instead! But if I do get some time after working on BotJuice and Jardins, I’ll try to write something for the Patreon!
As usual I want to thank my Patreon supporters for their invaluable support! You rock, so hard. Here are the names of the 3$+ supporters:
★Joseph White, ★Spaceling, rotatetranslate, Anne Le Clech, bbsamurai, HJS, slono, Austin East, Jefff, Meru, HERVAN, Andreas Bretteville, Bitzawolf, Paul Nguyen, Dan Lewis, Dan Rees-Jones, Reza Esmaili, Thomas Wright, Joel Jorgensen, Marty Kovach, Cole Smith, Tim and Alexandra Swast, berkfrei, Jearl, Flo Devaux, Johnathan Roatch, Raphael Gaschignard, Eiyeron, Sam Loeschen, Andrew Reitano, amy, Jakub Wasilewski, Gruber, yunowadidis-musik, Max Cahill, hushcoil, Jacel the Thing, Pierre B., Sean S. LeBlanc, Andrew Reist, vaporstack
And here’s a quick reminder that all Patreon supporters have access to an exclusive Discord, where they may ask me anything they want, and also see some exclusive content and previews!
Have a great week!
Take care!
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