Updates, Updates, Updates

Hello everyone, the past week has seen me busily working on Vacuum. This past weekend the GMC forums had a game jam competition. I know what you're thinking, "But Scott, a game jam means you're making a completely new game and wasting a weekend not working on Vacuum." This is true to an extent, but every game jam I enter into I take the theme and use that to work on some aspect of a major project I'm working on to truly iron out the kinks. I view it as a way to isolate a current feature that's a serious feature and devote a substantial period of time to it. Suffice to say the initial reviews of my game jam game don't seen too good thus far. However, that's great for Vacuum. I completely neglected play-testing my jam game for fun. Instead I was constantly tweaking AI and Construction aspects. Two things that are already being transferred from the jam game into Vacuum. Up until now I didn't really allow players an option for purchasing anything within Vacuum. This will all have changed by this weekend. The only question that remains is 1) Do I allow you to build the whole station? or 2)Do I allow you to take a random space station that you have to explore and build around what you randomly encounter? I'm currently trying both of these methods. We'll see which turns out better. More to come soon.

Back in the World

The past week has seen me cut-off from the internet after some issues with my ISP. Suffice to say I was paying a lot and getting a new service set up has been a long ordeal. Fear not, I'm back and the time without internet has allowed me to work on the game distraction free! I actually run GameMaker on a Macbook Pro running Windows 7 in Parallels, this gives me a huge range of options for graphics design and programming but can make it difficult to get quality videos and screenshots. I'm going to try and get a good number of them later this weekend so people can see how things are progressing. This week has seen me finally resolve the issue of having a decent background. Before the stars behind the space station where just white dots in the distance on a plain black background. We now have some really great backgrounds that are randomized every time you load up a game, leading to different designs, colors, and the formations of various nebula. A huge aesthetic improvement. I've also been toying around with including health bars for the units to make it easier to see which units are injured and which aren't. Not to mention some additional units to select from the UI and I've been trying to write some "zombie" code for the separate zombie survival version of the game. Tomorrow I'm hoping to play around with my idea for unit movement. Marines are currently setup to follow a very traditional RTS style movement system although I've been formulating a plot to try and spice that up a bit. We'll see how it works. I may end up releasing two different versions to see how people like it down the road (assuming I can code it to turn one off and one on easily enough). Look for some more in-game photos soon as well as more tidbits later this weekend!

All the Little Things

As I work on the game I realize just how many little considerations are needed when putting together a game. Usually after I implement something new to Vacuum I try to "play test" it to make sure it's all running the way I'd like. This makes development of individual things a little slower but it ensures higher quality for whatever I do have. Going about this I've gotten to the quite where I realized I really need to start making some decisions for the game such as do I offer it as a windowed game? Fullscreen? How should the menus operate? Should I include a tutorial or simply go the Minecraft route and throw people in? Let me know what you think, follow me on Twitter.

Music

So Vacuum now has two music tracks. I haven't decided if one is going to be a "menu" track and the other in the game or if both will be game tracks. At any rate, here's the intro to one of the tracks for the game.

UPDATES!

Sorry for the lack of updates, it's not for lack of my work on Vacuum, I can assure you that. So since my last update we've had a successful Kickstarter! I've been hard at working trying to get as many features as possible into the game for the Kickstarter release for backers that will be hapeening ASAP but no later than September. After a bit of time for the Kickstarter backers to play the game and provide me suggestions I'll release the initial alpha to the public, probably sometime in October. I've been tweaking things for the space station, as well as adding asteroids as a random occurrence that strikes the space station and rip a hole inside. I'm currently experimenting with some other alternative ways to seal up the station and allow engineers to repair these broken holes. I've also been working on the Kickstarter Stretch goal that was reached, which allows for an alternative game move of zombie survival. The zombie sprites are currently being worked on, as are some others, so I hope to post those shortly. Until next time! -Scott