Game
Hensen Hopper
1 year 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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I did get a lot more done on the backdrop yesterday, by the way! It's not finished by any means, in fact, it's quite empty and even ugly in some places, but it's beginning to come together!

I've been working on improving the backdrop for Hensen Hopper! The way I'm doing it this time is I'm creating a 32x32 image for each texture I want, tiling it to fill the backdrop image, and using layer masks to "paint" where that texture will be visible.

Very unfinished but the backdrop image, as it is in this video, is already leagues better than what I had last weekend! I'm going to work on it incrementally over the coming weeks as I work on implementing the stages idea I talked about before!

AAH! SPIDERS!

I've worked out a process for drawing bushes that I'm using for the backdrop! First I draw the branches, then "paint" where the bush texture will be, copy it's alpha to a new layer in white, then draw it's shadows in a layer over the bush layer.

You see I was GONNA get to work on the procedural enemy wave generation algorithm but then I remembered I still haven't drawn a defeat animation for the spider so now I'm working on that instead. 🤣

Doing it in layers starting with the web as usual.

Been working on the artwork for the "stage complete" screen all morning! Right now I'm improving the shadows/shading for Hensen because he is a part of that screen. I do need to work out the contrast between the text and the backdrop image, I know.

This is just about the only situation in which I'll ever do this. I almost never put multiple calls to methods on the same line but here I've logged a warning to remind furure me to do something I didn't have time to do today in a glaringly obvious way.

I've been working on the backdrop today! Among other things I've done, I made a bush! I know, SOOOO impressive lol.

This is a short video showing off the new procedurally generated enemy waves in Hensen! In theory, the game will become more and more unpredictable as I continue to build and implement new enemies!!!