State of play

In which Beerman realises yet again that he’s not updated the blog for nearly 2 months…

Bad developer! No cookie! So anyway, I’ve been beavering away at Beercave Towers for a while, thought it was about time I checked in.

Playing Gods

I finished the first fully working build of the client code back in January. Back then it was running a 12-square, 4-continent board for ease of development, and looked a little like this:

Basic client It’s not pretty, but it gets the job done. After a short break working on other stuff (see below), my hotshot graphics team kicked into gear this week with the first of the art assets - a shiny new game board!

New board in client Now we’re getting somewhere.

Seksy particle effects Available moves are highlighted with divine fire. Currently I’m awaiting delivery of my first batch of gods to replace the random temporary models I’m using at the minute. Be nice to have some proper graphics in there, but I’m gonna miss cat-Jesus…

Droidy Shooty Thing

This one’s been dragging a little bit. I’ve had the core code working fine for a while now but once again the content problem reared it’s ugly head. I’ve spent way too much time playing with a succession of level generators, none of which I was really happy with. I think the biggest hurdle is I was trying to hard to make the game into something it didn’t want to be. The early builds felt massively like Gridrunner++, what with the touch/mouse control and swirly enemy streams, and I overcompensated in trying to avoid that. Once I quit worrying so much about it and just embraced the game it wants to be, it’s started coming together a bit. Don’t have any current screenshots but I’ll try and put together a few along with a short demo video shortly.

Other stuff

I’m starting to get a bit of a feel for libGDX now, thanks to Droidy Shooty Thing. One thing I do like is that with it all being Java I get Windows, Mac and Linux versions alongside Android with no extra effort. Just a shame Java’s such a pain in the arse to code with, but that’s a rant for another day. Still, I think I’ve pretty much found my toolset for the forseeable - Unity for 3D and heavy lifting, Java/libGDX for smaller stuff. I’m hoping to be able to bang out smallish mobile games reasonably quickly. Speaking of which:

Photobucket I wonder how Robotron would work as a turn-based strategy game…