Updates to Version 001

Hi everyone, I sent the Kickstarter Backer copy of the first alpha. It's incredibly buggy but that's the nature of alphas. I just wanted to let everyone know that I've already correct two of the issues that people noticed, the game crashing when hitting the escape key and selecting return to game and an issue where the credits sometimes didn't show. Below is a list of known bugs or planned features for the next Alpha 002. You'll see them with a strikethrough if they've been finished for the next version. 1. "Return to Game" button on Escape Menu crashes game. 2. Credits not always displaying. 3. Escape Menu covered by Station Walls 4. Various problems with Vacuum "spread" - Moot, implementing new Vacuum system. 5. Marines occasionally vanish to up left-hand corner. 6. Doors will get stuck if a unit blocks them on closing. 7. Marine shooting image occasionally faces the wrong direction. 8. Zombie Survival Version (Kickstarter Stretch-Goal)

Balancing

Good news. Today I've moved into balancing the alpha release. It involves me playing the game a lot (something that's already been happening). As I've said before, it's a pre-alpha. So it's far far far from complete and most things are far from finished or polished. I've been trying to get as many backer events and tiers into the game as possible but I'm planning on including most of those in a big push for the backer content as soon as everyone gets everything back to me as to what they want from their tier. Long story short, I'm trying to make the gameplay better given the level of content that's present. This is my dream project, so it'll constantly be getting tweaked for quite awhile.

Select What You Want

So one of the biggest problems with migrating from GM 8.1 to GM:Studio is the lack of built-in menus. GM 8.1 had a great feature that made drop down menus a piece of cake. Granted, this feature would only work on a Windows computer, so I wouldn't be able to totally rely on it anyway. Well, I've finally included drop down menus into Vacuum. Although they're not terribly complex it's something that I'm not accustomed to having to program. I've tried to implement a simple but attractive system. They're really necessary for in-game events and a few of the feature. Screen shots to come shortly.

A Little Help with the Heavy Lifting

As promised, here's an image from the game. These little mechs are what you'll need if you want to move shipping containers around and hopefully down the road I'll add additional things in the game that'll require the mech. I'm imagining it smashing pirates and holding open doors that would otherwise be closed.

I'm also very optimistic to get a build out to backers before September. It won't have all of the backer requests in it, but I've already incorporated a few of the backer suggestions, etc. into the game.

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.