First round of art for the Design your Own Ship contest!

February 15, 2014 by Coldrice

Yay! I am so glad to see art coming in for my little contest. I’m sure many people are eager to get a hold of a $50 steam gift card! I know I would be. Here’s what we got for our first few days:

Nathan O’Brien
NathanObrien

“I made a ship that’s basically a railgun with a bridge and an engine strapped to it”

David Khachaturov

DavidKhachaturov

DavidKhachaturovFish

The SS Kingyo. Kingyo means Goldfish in Japanese. It is a random encounter ship that comes from a distant sector of the universe.It needs such a big reactor because Kingyos travel far and wide to sell sushi across the entire universe.
Its inhabitants are gold-fish people (Kingyos)

Don Cull
Don

Ezekial Jeansonne-Moore

Ezekial

Josef Gutwenger

Josef

It’s a medium sized low-tech freighter vessel, build for long distance travel. The ship consist of two different parts, the actual vessel and a huge cargo container

Lynne Kogotkoff

Lynne

Heresy Heavy Industries is a massive corporation that’s producing spaceships, military equipment of different types and so on. They’re able of producing that all without depending on another corporations as they have their own mines, shipyards and factories.The 824H is one of most minimalistic designs, created with a thought that completely any shipyard should be able to build these ships. Since their armor isn’t really strong, it’s usually reinforced with additional plates, attached in any way shipyards see possible, usually rivets.

Approximate length: 25 meters. Armor: Front: 40 cm rolled steel. Side, top, bottom, aft: 10 cm rolled steel.

Drive section: 3x nuclear thermal rocket engines Fuel reserve: 100m^3 or more with additional tanks.

Role: battlegroup and trade convoy escort, interception, starbase defense.

Rowan Nagel

Rowan

I think it would be some sort of starter ship or something. It’s called the “Chlorophyl”. Built by the eco-friendly company “Gehko”

I can’t stress enough how tickled I am by these designs! I really like the creativity here. Remember, I’m basing it 100% on idea/concept. You don’t have to be a world class artist! For a link to the contest rules, you can check’m out here: http://coldricegames.com/design-your-own-starship-contest/

Filed Under: Interstellaria Tagged With: a, contest, design, game, indie, ship, star

My Candy Jam submission

February 3, 2014 by Coldrice

Introducing Candy Crawl!

http://coldrice.itch.io/candy-crawl

tavernmockup

Sadly, I ran out of time to complete the project. The co-manager of the Jam said I had all week, but personally I can’t take away any more time from Interstellaria for this little side project. I was able to try some new things which worked out VERY well – but in the end I didn’t feel 100% successful. Here’s the score at the end of 9(ish) days.

WHAT WENT WELL
-Procedural content (though there is still a 1% chance for an error in tile layout)
-Simple dynamic lighting
-Aesthetic

WHAT WENT WRONG
-Gameplay, I had to redo it 3 times as it wasn’t very fun (and I’m still not happy with the end result)
-Pathfinding. I’d dabbled in it before and though it’d be easy. I really should have taken care of this early on, but instead I tried to do it 24 hours before the end. Whoops
-Content. I didn’t have a chance to make a lot of enemies, or animations. I also couldn’t implement an item store or skill tree. This is mostly due to point one, which is I spent 3 days redoing game play and lost a lot of time
-No planning. I try to plan everything out, but Candy crawl was literally made up day by day. A lot of “hmm, let me try this.” I probably could have got a lot more done in a shorter amount of time if I had a better plan going into it.

The game was based upon a simple game I though could translate well to procedural content, Lego Heroica:

thumb640x360

I’m a bit disappointed in the project. I had a lot planned, and if I had planned out the gameplay(most combat) parts a little better it would have been awesome. I ended up spending so much time on one aspect, that it all lost steam by the end. Luckily, I can probably re-use the code for future projects. It’s nice because I got to try out some new ideas and it works as a good tech demo for me. Don’t be surprised to see an isometric mini game sometime in the future from me!

A quick techical “how did I do that” for the different aspects.

RANDOM ROOMS
First – tile placement. The tiles are placed by placing one tile a 0, and then choosing a random “free” side for the next tile. The game has between 5-20 tiles. Each iteration the game picks a random tile and finds a side. The game will skip that tile if it can’t find a free side. In order to detect a free side I just had to calculate the distance between a tile that was diagonal of the tile (for isometric). If there was a tile at that distance, then that side is occupied. Else, take that spot.

The actual layout of the tile graphics is done by a simple string. “dirt,” “grass,” “cave,” etc… when a tile is placed (as mentioned above) it has a 50 percent chance to have the same string as the tile it was positioned off of, or switch to another string. Each level has a list of themes (for example I had only “Grass” and “dirt” for a long time) to choose from. I have 4 tiles of each theme, and the game just picks a random 1-4 number to determine which grass or dirt tile it needs.

Each room is saved to the game, and a new room is generated when you enter it and then saved. The entire dungeon would be generated if I was making a more complex game, but letting it generate room by room worked out fine.

Dynamic Lighting

I really cheated on this one. Not wanting to put a lot of time into it, I devised a fairly simple system.
jellybean

I created 4 versions of the sprite, one for each direction of shading. I ended up ditching the bottom shade as it wasn’t really needed for a game this simple (I had though about adding torches but never did). For tiles, I made it even more simple – I just made two versions:

tiles

From there, I created a fairly simple and messy algorithm which took a light sources “strength” and calculated the distance from the light source to the object. ON tiles, it simply made the black version more opaque (but never 100%) and on objects like coins or the player it made the different shaded version more opaque. The base sprite of the player was the darkest one.

The end result was actually pretty fantastic, and had I been making a different sort of game I would have gone all out with it:

T4ylbOW

A few people asked about things like using height maps, but it was a little overkill honestly. The effect was there for very minimal effort.

The Builds

By the way, here’s something neat – each build of the game!

Version 1 – Random tile layouts. You can see overlapping tiles because their opacity is 25%

coldricegames.com/candycrawl/Candycrawlv1.html

Version 2 – Better tile algorithm, a jelly bean you can move around!

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv2.html

Version 3 – Bean is slightly animated, and you can travel from room to room

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv3.html

Version 4 – You can now travel back and forth between the maps (saves the maps)

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv4.html

Version 5 – First shot at making walls

http://www.coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv5.html

Version 6 – Implemented mini map

http://www.coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv6.html

Version 7 – Added dice rolling for Action Points

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv7.html

Version 8 – Added enemies, roll 3 or over to kill them (combat tiles)

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv8.html

Version 9 – Added HP bar (4 health)

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv9.html

Version 10 – Added coins, and soda that heals you

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv10.html

Version 11 – Added tile graphics

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv11.html

Version 12 – Added simple dynamic lighting (slight slow though)

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv12.html

Version 13 – Text pop ups and a special ability (with mana)

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv13.html

Version 14 – Added random events, and the ability to pickup/use items

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv14.html

Version 15 – Action points removed, more events added, more combat prompts added. Spent all day trying to make combat more clear. UI redone to have an HP amount so I can do more than 4 hp

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv15.html

Version 16 – Combat version 2 – added dice with “faces” on them. Turned ability into combat ability. Added chests

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv16.html

Version 17 – Switched to a combat screen, made dice smaller, cleared combat texts

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawl17.html

Version 18 – Added leveling which gives you more dice. Pathfinding v1 (and behind the scenes v2, and v3 which I never uploaded)

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv18.html

Version 19 – Added weapons, new abilities when you level up, new tilesets, random level selection, pathfinding v5. sadly, lighting was broken in this version

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv19.html

So there you have it, a game in 9ish days from beginning to (sort of) end. Here’s a bonus – the art assets i made for it:

sprites

Filed Under: gamedev, Gamejam, Unity Tagged With: candy, crawl, game, Game Jam, jam, lighting, procedural

INTERSTELLARIA KICKSTARTER IS LIVE!

November 6, 2013 by Coldrice Leave a Comment

Let’s blow this up big!

Filed Under: Cross Platform, gamedev, Interstellaria, Kickstarter, Unity Tagged With: dev, Futile, game, indie, kickstarter, sim, space, Unity

I did my first ever live stream for Interstellaria!

October 8, 2013 by Coldrice Leave a Comment

Whew, what fun time! I did my first ever live stream! I probably spent more time talking than I did actually working. I really had a good time though and I’m interested in doing it again sometime. I’ll probably schedule it ahead of time.

Moving on, here is my result for the night:

batgifGT

The bat was drawn, animated, coded, and implemented live! neat!

Filed Under: gamedev, Interstellaria, Live Stream, Unity Tagged With: dev, game, live, stream

Buy, sell, work!

October 5, 2013 by Coldrice 2 Comments

So lately I’ve been working hard to tie up features which are still “open.” An example would be the buy/sell screen:

a5ECj7H

It now pulls info from the ship correctly as well as option to “buy” things.

With my dev cycle here’s what goes into a week:

1) Graphics. I usually have a list of graphical things to create. Usually I do this at the beginning of the week because I can write posts to get feedback right away. For example, this boar guy!

boar

2) New features. Usually this includes hefty coding. I try to do this early in the week/weekend because with my work schedule it’s just easier to get things done before the work week kicks off. A good example of this would be like I’ll be doing this week – I’m going to program in a “boss room” found on some planets. Some planets you’re just exploring for profit, a few planets have an actual enemy at the end, and are more linear.

3) Fix up or complete old features. Using the above “boss room” example, I will be coding in everything except the return to the ship or ending fanfare effects. So this weekend I’ll make the boss room, but some other day I have on my plan to finish it.

4) Debug. A constant never ending feature. Once I get into 1.0 Alpha I’ll be adding Refactoring to that list.

The problem with the above plan is there are a ton of trailing features that never hit step three yet until now. SOO that means I’ve got work to do.

Filed Under: gamedev, Interstellaria, Unity Tagged With: dev, game, to do

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