Hi

I’ve settled on a title for my little bullet hell: Gunship Souls. My plan with this is for it to be a bullet hell riff on Titan Souls. In other words, I want it to be brutally difficult and full of enormous bosses.

At the end of day two, I’ve implemented an asteroid belt with autofactories that build simple enemy gunships. Whenever you get close to one of the rings of the belt, its factories spin up and start trying to kill you.

Trouble I encountered today was mainly related to the starfield generation I mentioned in my previous post. Somehow I’ve managed to implement the starfield generator in such a way that I have to translate between its coordinate space, and the coordinate space the rest of the game uses. This is okay when it comes to things like, drawing the rocks and colliding things with them. The problem is: I’ve lost the ability to change the scale. Everything scales nicely when I zoom the camera in and out… except the asteroids. I worked for about 3 hours trying to “tweek” the existing system to allow for camera zoom (something I desperately want). Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the jam version will have the dynamically zoomed camera I wanted.

This is really too bad! A camera that intelligently frames the scene is super key to a game like mine. As it stand, I’m stuck in super zoomed in mode… With any luck I can change this manuall so that the game is at least stuck in some reasonable level of zoom, otherwise it is just too hard!

Day two has also come with the realization that the bosses are going to have to wait. I’d really, really like to have bullet time and volleys of homing missiles… and I think I should prioritize those higher. The top priority at the moment, though, will be a high score system so that players can at least be competing on some level. It will probably be a combination of kills and time, since just surviving is pretty hard.

And that concludes day two!

z.