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.

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

Kickstarter

Well today I launched a Kickstarter to try and afford some software upgrades and additional costs for my graphics guru. I've included the link below and would be humbled if you'd check it out and spread the word.

Kickstarter

Finally, New Updates

So after spending nearly a week fine-tuning everything with the software update there are new features in Vacuum! I've attached two screenshots below. One is of the new and improved "energy field" that is used at hangars to allow ships to enter and leave but keep oxygen from spilling out into space. The other is of the new menu bar. I'm pretty happy with the look of it and although it only has one button right now (a button to call in additional marines, for a fee) the logical has all been fully worked out. So it's now only a matter of me deciding what things I'd like to allow people to be able to call in and pay for or build.

Spring in Your Step

So the past week has seen no actual developments with the game. Instead I've been going through the painstaking process of migrating the game from GM4Mac to GM:S. It's a slow process but it should pay dividends. Not only will it allow me to release the game for Linux but I'll also get a 2-3x speed increase in processing speed. This'll allow me to have even more units and larger levels in the game. So next week expect some new feature upgrades and stick with me, as I know it's boring hearing there have only been performance tweaks but it'll allow for lower end machines and now Linux to run the game as well.

Losing Oxygen

So today I finally refined the "Vacuum" that fills the ship when an event happens. As you can see in the below images, the older method wasn't very convincing that there was a ton of air being sucked out of the space station. I'm really happy with the change between these two systems and I'll be refining it a bit more but I'd say it's about 90% there now.

Old Breach

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New Breach

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Simulation

So the programming side of this has been a bit slower than usual and that's due largely to me reading up on AI simulation. Fear not, I'm currently working on implementing a huge bulk of the game AI. It's a huge aspect of how the crew on board the space station operate and I'm hoping that by the end of this weekend I'll have integrated how the crew behave and how the economic system in the game work. I've also been working on a few more simple aspects of Vacuum. Below you can see a shuttle arriving at one of the hangars and dropping off a refugee.

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Housekeeping

So today there wasn't anything too exciting going on with Vacuum. As the number of images and units continues to grow I've had to do some serious housekeeping. I spent two hours today just organizing everything into folders and trying to optimize code. While working on the zoning to create rooms I noticed the zoning itself was really slowing down gameplay. No worries now, I've not only optimized that specific code but gone through, line-by-line and optimized everything. The game is already running much more quickly, even with dozens of units on the screen at once. All this is before I'll be upgrading my software too! So I'm hoping for up to a few thousand units to be able to be represented at once.

Trade this for That?

I've been working on the trader and here's some of the progress. You can see the cargo containers that will deploy when you buy or sell goods. The traders will then fly into your hangar and drop-off or pick-up cargo. The energy fields are currently placeholder graphics.

New Model

So I now have a new model, the first trader ship to be created for Vacuum. Tonight I'll start programming on how to make it have a role in the game but suffice to say it'll play a vital role in ensuring your space station can trade with others throughout the galaxy.

Soon, full speed ahead!

So this week I will be wrapping up the bulk of my obligations for the remainder of the summer. This means that I will be able to give significantly more attention to Vacuum for the next few months, so you should see a slew of updates coming every week. I'm really hoping to have some kind of gameplay video/alpha version available at the end of May or toward the beginning of June at the latest. I'm currently producing the game on a a Mac running GM4Mac. Unfortunately these means I can only create .dmg files, not .exe. This is something I'll be trying to find a workaround for. If yoyogames had a GM:Studio release for Mac it wouldn't be a problem. Regardless, I'll post more on this matter as we get into the summer. Fear not though, Vacuum will be released on Windows, Mac, and Linux regardless of what I have to do to sort out this currently existing issue.

Workaround

Technology, it's great when it works and awful when it doesn't. So I keep my latest backups of Vacuum on a flash drive that always sits next to my laptop. Someone used the flash drive and deleted everything on it. Fear not, everything isn't lost. However, I have spent the entire day reworking the hunger and purchasing system. So I was set back by at least a day, possibly part of another but we'll see. I keep multiple redundant backups but they're not always the newest but always recent enough that nothing too catastrophic can happen.

Lots of New Features

As promised, there's been a lot happening with Vacuum. I've decided to list what I've knocked out in the past day below. *Full fledged hunger system. -Individual crew members now get hungry. When there hunger hits a certain threshold, but before it hits zero and they start to lose health, they'll go in search of food on your ship. I still have to program this to have pathfinding, as they'll run into walls right now, but the basic logic is there and adding pathfinding is as simple as a quick tweak of my movement code for combat. *Unlock parts of the station. Anyone familiar with Startopia will remember the ability to unlock additional "sections" of the space station. I'm implementing something similar with Vacuum. When you have enough money, or some other resource, haven't decided yet, you can unlock additional spaces on your station. *Zoning - Ever play SimCity? I'm implementing a similar zoning system into Vacuum. Select the type of structure you'd like to build and your engineers will begin to build that zoned structure inside your space station. I'm really excited for this, as it'll allow for dynamic space stations. Zone a small area for a hangar and you'll be limited to the number of ships that can come in (and the size of space pirate boarding parties). *Hangar energy fields - Since anything exposed to the vacuum of space in the game will be sucked out into space I needed to come up with some way to make hangars that allow ships to come into and out of the space station. I decided on energy fields that let objects pass through them but don't lose atmosphere. This serves a dual purpose by allowing engineers to apply smaller versions of these energy fields if a hole gets blasted into the hull of the station and people are being sucked out. I hope this slew of updates and work makes up for my lack of updates over the past few weeks. Until next time!

My Apologies

I know I've really fallen off on the updates. Don't worry, I haven't forgotten bout Vacuum. Law school exams have been kicking my butt the past week plus. After this coming Wednesday I'll be able to focus a TON more time into the game. I'm hoping to have a nice little gif video to upload tonight of the progress so far!

Newest Update

Law school exams have been slowing down the development but this weekend I was able to make some more substantial progress. I've been adding emoticons to the crew whenever something happens. So now when a a few marines die in a firefight the crew becomes depressed and scared and you can see this in real time with emoticons above their heads. I've also been working on making sections of the space station unlock-able.