Devlogs – Page 4 – StarvingFox Studio

Devlog 5

Main menu

The background and animations are done, still need to work on UI and maybe improve the font, but it’s there ! I modeled a huge mothership and a quite accurate earth planet (after 15 hours playing around with Google Map I hope it’s accurate !)

Levels rework

I have been play testing a lot recently, and beside fixing dozens and dozens of bugs, I figured out level 2 and 3 were far less fun than the first level. There was actually huge verticallity issues, so I decided to go back to modelling and try to improve what has been made. Spent 2 hours playing level 2 and I think it’s good now. Still need to spend a few hours on level 3 to be sure it’s fun enough after a longer play time.

Tweakings

Teleporters now have a delay between when you take it and when you actually get to the destination point. This will prevent getting surprised by enemies that would be at the same position you’re supposed to respawn. Arrows on teleporters are also animated and show the direction the teleporter is going;
Explosion decal sprites disables smoothly;
The game goes in pause mode when the window loses focus;
Mouse aiming system improved;
Controller assignement is working;
Health boxes have a new sound;
Super Meduse explosion range have been reduced;

Player 2 camera now shake along with the Player 1 camera;
Each player aiming crosshair has been disabled in the other part of the screen;
Health Auto Regen does not work anymore when the player is dead;
Money spent variable in the Win Panel has been replaced with Lifes lost;
Wave 7 of level 1 is easier.

Miscellaneous

Level 2 control room screens are now animated;

On buying an upgrade, particles are spawned on all players, upgrade sound have also been changed;
Stairs that have multiple destinations now have a panel to give the player visual feedback of the current destination.

Devlog 4

Uncategorized / Par Pierre

Teleporters

Teleporters can now be used to travel quicker through dense levels.

Cutscenes

A short cutscene have been done for each level.

Loading screens

Loading screens for each levels.

Miscellaneous

– A restart button have been added to the in-game menu.
– New icons showed in the last devlog have been implemented and some do not fit and have to be redone.

Side Projects

When I start being overwhelmed and I feel like my productivity is getting too low, I just « take a break » to work on side projects.

This week I’ve made some level design and I prototyped a mobile game (2 different projects).
I can’t obviously show anything about the prototype but here is a shot at one of my level design session.

Devlog 3

Uncategorized / Par Pierre

New split screen camera

There is 3 split-screen modes players can choose from : Vertical, Horizontal, and Dynamic.

Horizontal : The screen is split so there is one player on top of the screen and one on the bottom.
Vertical : The screen is split so there is one player on the left of the screen and one on the right.
Dynamic : According to players position in the level, the camera is either split or not. If players get too far from each others the cameras split and rotate accordingly to the position of players, if they get close to each others the cameras merge back to 1.

Script cleaning

The main scripts managing player controls and enemies health have been completely remade from scratch to allow more complex behaviors, especially player’s weapons behaviors and enemies ondeath behaviors.

Super enemies behaviors

Empowered versions of enemies that have been modeled recently have been implemented into the game.

New enemies death animations

Almost every enemy now have a death animation and is not just disapearing into an explosion.

New icons

Item icons and structure icons have been made.

Devlog 2

Uncategorized / Par Pierre

Lighting has been set up for level 2 and 3 and lightmaps have been baked, granting an average 10% performance boost on each level.

A variant of almost every enemy has been made and will be an empowered version of an already existing enemy that will appear time to time to add challenge to the game.

Here are the 4 variants that have been made this week, and stats differences with the originals :

Devlog 1

Uncategorized / Par Pierre

It’s been a long way since the start of the development of Defense Of Humanity, and now start the devlogs.

So twice or more a month will be published a recap of the progress I’ve made on the game or any project I’m working on, this will allow me to share uncompressed screenshots, gifs, and more.

What is Defense of Humanity ?

It is a Tower Defense high scale voxel action game currently in development using the Unity game engine and it is the current main project I’m working on as a solo indiegame developer. The final game is planned to have around 20 playable levels part of 5 separated missions (4 levels = 1 mission). Each mission is linked to the other and even if the game is not story based, I really wanted to have a backstory that would give a guideline to what the player is doing in the game.

Release date and pricing

It is planned to release in early access with the first mission (4 levels + tutorial) first semester of 2019 on Steam and Itch.io with other missions coming through the year and the game hopefully reaching its final form at the end of 2019. I think it’s better for the game to be release in early access so anyone can buy the game cheaper (planned to be priced 10$ on release then pricing up on each new mission added to reach 15$ as a final price) and have an impact on the development by giving feedbacks that can lead to an improvement of the final game.

Game budget

Budget speaking, the development is relying on personnal savings that have almost been entirely spent but development wise I think everything that was needed has been bought (that’s what I was thinking when I recently had to aquire an asset so the local coop feature of the game could work properly) but there is still things to be paying for like Steam publishing fees, any asset that can improve the final game, or taxes and such, even though i’m doing most of what’s needed (modeling, programming, music, gamedesign,…).

We’re far from the end of this project, but I hope that players will soon be able to get their hands on the game and participate to this journey with me.