December. It’s almost Christmas! That’s a little concerning, I still have a bunch of shopping to do.
I am kind of transitioning these to be my Wednesday writings, I think, or at least they’re meant to be; since that’s when my “working on things” week begins and ends, it makes sense to think about things like this then.
She said, writing this on Saturday.
I guess last week I said I was gonna figure out how health and damage works, so I’ve been thinking about that a lot.
I think what I am leaning towards is having two kinds of health, for different purposes. You have a shield, which takes hits and gets depleted and then regenerates, and you have your hull, which doesn’t get affected unless your shield has run out, but it’s much more serious when it gets hit. This kind of thing is common in Media About Spaceships, and it means the game can be kind of forgiving - you can take a few hits, and as long as your shield doesn’t completely run out, the damage isn’t permanent. This can then be adjusted to make the game easier or more difficult.
It also works well with the ideas I talked about a while ago about breaking things - I think any damage taken to the hull of your ship directly has a chance to damage your internal systems, like your engines or weapons. They can probably be fixed, but maybe not just in space, you might need to get to a space station or friendly planet or something - and until you get there, you’re stuck flying without the ability to turn or shoot left. And so avoiding damage isn’t just about protecting your health as a number, but also as your ability to use all of the tools you have available to you, and to not have to compromise and adapt to a qualitatively different situation.
This week, a number of us were involved in a two day game jam organised by–quick check to remind myself whether I have doxxed myself in these posts yet–by AIE. The theme was Areas of Game Development, which included further elaboration that the organisers were looking for a game that would function to advertise the industry to young people.
I… have multiple thoughts about this, but at least they were upfront about it, I guess. That said, the game we ended up making isn’t exactly taking the theme in the best of faith.
Anyway, you can play it here!
This was my first game jam with more than one person, or with a team I had known for less than a couple of months, and it was a genuinely different experience for those things. It had been a while since I last went through the process of learning how to work with someone under that kind of time pressure, and it honestly went more smoothly than I was expecting, and we… might be doing more of that kind of thing?
Because I shifted my landmark dates for these, a full progress week has come and gone since the last post. I got shooting and health working! It was good! And then the week after that I implemented camera tracking of the player ship, and shot delay on weapons, which I might??? Think more about for future design things soon.
Next week… Talking about game ideas for the game jam made us realise that, actually, coming up with game concepts is easy. Well, not easy, but coming up with a base idea that we all kind of fell in love with wasn’t as difficult as we thought it would be. So our goals for this week are to do that again, to come up with the base concept for a game we would like to make every day until next Wednesday.
It’s the weekend and I am two days behind, this is going well.
