So, here's my first entry on any dev blog ever. I find it hard to stay motivated in making my games, and to find the time, so I figure a regular journal will help quell that problem. Might as well give it a shot.

I've been making games for about 3 years, during which time I've published a whopping total of 0 titles. Impressive right?

I've started work on a few projects that were just too broad in scope to be realistic to complete given my current situation. Between work and kids, I'm left with an hour here and an hour there to develop, so I've decided to put big projects on hold and just make something small that I can get out there.

I'll probably post some post-mortems for some of my other projects eventually, but for now... let's get to the meat and potatoes.

For a few months, I've been working here and there on a casual 2D zombie survival shooter, with intent to release on free-to-play markets like Kongregate and ArmorGames.

The basic mechanic of the game is similar to the one found in Balloon In A Wasteland. Our hero enters the scene on a motorbike which breaks down. Your goal is to (slowly) repair the bike while surviving endless waves of zombies. Once the bike is fixed, you drive away and win.

The game will be all original pixel art (which I'm fairly new to) and relies heavily on upgrades and levelling to keep the player motivated. I'll provide a list of these upgrades, etc. in a future post, along with a Game Design Document, but for now, I'll just start listing what's been implemented.

So, here's an annotated image of what I've got so far (annotations in green text):

1. Health bar UI(non-functional)

• I still have to program the enemy AI and loss of player health and player death.
  
• The icon still needs some tinkering.
  

• The bar and its text work, but currently there is no levelling up functionality.
  
• The icon still needs some tinkering.
  

• This displays the number of rounds loaded in the current weapon, the capacity of the weapon and the number of rounds owned. Its fill also scales depending on how many rounds are currently in the weapon. The icon to the left, currently showing 9mm is placeholder and will be replaced with a nice pixel icon in future.
  
• I currently have 11 different weapons including:
  
  
  • a .22 revolver
    
  • 9mm
    
  • uzi
    
  • 12 gauge
    
  • mp5
    
  • ak47
    
  • .50 cal sniper
    
  • combat shotgun
    
  • M4A1
    
  • AA-1 full auto shotgun
    
  • 5mm minigun
    

• Simply displays the amount of money you currently have. This increases when you walk over a coin (see 6)
  

• This guy is 90% complete. I have to tweak his animation a bit, and fix some issues with how the weapon fires, but I'm pretty happy with him.
  
• His run cycle:
  
• I have to make him lean forward in the animation, he's a bit stiff at the moment.
  
• His controller is complete, and he already has some of the framework for the player upgrades/levelling that's to come
  

• Currently I only have coin pickups. I have 4 of different value:
  
  
  • 1
    
  • 5
    
  • 10
    
  • 25
    

• I've only got a single enemy type at the moment, more to come. I've tentatively named him 'Skinbie' for Skinny Zombie.
  
• His walk/attack cycle:
  
• Again, I need to tweak the animation, adding more movement to the legs and leaning him forward a bit. I took some inspiration from daggerfall's zombie for this guy.
  
• All he does at the moment is cycle through his animation, disappear when killed, add XP to the player when dead and display it's XP amount with indication text (see below).
  

• I've got three flavors of this at the moment. One for displaying enemy damage (shown), one for displaying cash pickup values (in green), and one for displaying XP increases (blue).
  

That's pretty much it at the moment.

Tonight I'm going to try really hard to get some time in and make the player's health functional and adding a death screen. That will include also getting the Skinbie's AI done (he will simply move toward the player until he is a certain distance away, and will deal damage perpetually while touching the player), which shouldn't be too hard.

So that's all I have to say right now... I guess before I go I'll dump a messy list of functionality I still have to implement. I'll pull this list into future posts and maybe add to it as needed and strike through it as I complete the items.

• Enemy AI
  
• Player Health
  
• Player Death
  
• Level Up
  
• Upgrades
  
  
  • ?Will add list of upgrades and skills here in the future