Game
Hensen Hopper
5 months ago

I've actually had the core concept of Hensen Hopper in mind for a while now. I'm happy to finally do something with it! My learning focus for this project is mostly on animation because right now that's my weakest area as a solo developer.


hensenhopper_mdoiktufld.png

So far, Hensen Hopper features a classic shmup game-play flow. Enemies spawn in columns, wait and fire for a time, and then fly past the main character to de-spawn off-screen. The player takes damage when Hensen is hit by flying stingers fired by the Yellow Jacket enemies or if they touch an enemy. There is one working enemy type currently which is about as basic as a shmup enemy gets, they fly in, hover for roughly ten seconds firing bullets intermittently, and then fly out, but I plan on coding more and unique enemy types after I finish the demo. Right now, (almost) everything in the game has sound effects, music, and animations. I am using royalty free music and sounds (alongside some sounds I recorded myself) from various sources who will be credited in the credits tab of Hensen Hopper's main menu as with Deathly Descent and It's a Cube.

hensen_early_gameplay.gif

As I said above, animation is one of my primary learning focuses with this project because, and this is especially apparent when you look at the sprite-sheet animations for Deathly Descent, animation is probably my weakest area as a game developer right now. One improvement I've been trying to make in particular is keeping a consistent sprite-sheet frame-rate of 24 frames-per-second (fps) which is, according to what I've read online, the industry standard frame-rate for 2D animation. This doesn't mean every single sprite-sheet in Hensen Hopper is 24 frames, but I've been putting care into intelligently choosing each animation's frame count based on the duration of the animation at an overall rate of 24 fps, for example, the splat animation when the honey bullets hit an enemy is 8 frames because that animation is roughly a third of a second long.

gimp-210_m3rs6vixtl.png

My plan at the moment is to have a beta/demo version of this game ready by the end of the year. The full game is going to expand upon what's in the demo so I'm trying to keep the demo small. I really don't have a whole lot else to do when it comes to getting the demo version of the game ready, however there are many loose ends I still need to tie before I can release a demo version.

To Do:

  • Create button art for the main menu buttons

  • Search for a good font for the main menu buttons and in-game text

  • Add collision animation and sound effects for enemy bullets

  • Add more detail to the in-game background tile-map

  • Enemy and player defeat animation

  • Build interactive pause and death screen menus

That's all I have for today, thanks for reading! I'm planning to start posting to GameJolt a lot more frequently with images, videos, or simply stories to tell about what I've done each day so stay tuned if you're interested!

- Matt

Game Dev
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Working on getting the itch page for Hensen Hopper set up which means creating a separate cover image for the game on itch (different aspect ratio there). I want to publish that with first beta build of the game so I DO need to get a move on with it.

I drew a concept sketch of the beetle enemy based on a real-world species called the grapevine beetle. This enemy will NOT fire bullets at the player but instead moves back and forth in front of other enemies blocking your bullets from hitting them.

Finally working on the sprite for the beetle enemy!!! I need to get off my computer and do some stuff right now but I thought the idea of posting a headless (I haven't done the head yet) beetle screenshot was hilarious so I'm doing that first lmao.

I have two things to show off!!! Firstly, the hints system is now (in enough of a sense for the beta build-out at least) functional, and, secondly, I tweaked the honey-bullet sounds a bit to try to make attacking the enemies more satisfying.

I DID end up making the body and elytra both 1 cycle/s and the wings 6 cycles/s. I'm working on a video of the animation itself playing in the Unity editor so you guys can see it properly. I think it turned out well!

The new heal-up drop in Hensen Hopper. May not be a cameo of something in one of my earlier games like I may or may not have directly stated I was going to make it in a post I made the other day.

I've gotten the defeat animation for the enemies in this game working! Next thing I need is a good sound to complete the effect. I quite like this animation as-is but I'll probably tweak it post-beta. The first beta should be out by new years day!

OKAY, here's it ACTUALLY finished! Quite happy with how this turned out, actually! I've drawn this sprite in 3 layers, the wings, the elytra, and the body, which will make animating this thing a lot easier when I get onto doing that.

I added an animation and sound effect when the player collects the heal-up drop. In the lore, this flower is going to be Hensen's favorite food which is why the sound effect is a crunch like he's bitten into something.

It's kinda incredible how much simply changing the text font(s) will, by itself, complete the aesthetic of a game, especially in the menus.

I love TextMesh Pro so much!