Saturday, February 19, 2011

GUI progress in "Airship Game"!


 Woo! So much progress since my last batch of screenies!

So, here we get a few good screenshots of the current GUI.  As you can see, it's still a work in progress, a lot of elements are unfinished or missing, but this is a good start.

At the top of all three screens we have the health bar.  Pretty standard.  To the left of the health bar we have the in-game clock.  This is important, because different structures have different build times, and this allows the player to build settlements, and have a rough idea of when they will be finished so that they can go off and attend to other things.

Underneath the health bar is a bar that changes based on what the player currently has selected.  So, for instance if the player is in combat, the game displays the efficiency percentage for the repair, mobility, and weapons systems of the ship.  These percentages are based on the number of living crewmembers, but more on that in later posts.  This bar also displays the number of resources the player has when building, or the amount of "mana" (I'm not calling it that in the finished product)  the player has when calling on gods to perform miracles.

On the right side of the screen we see the Mode Selection bar.  Currently, the only mode that shows anything is the build mode, and you can flip through pages to display more unit types.  The "Magic" mode will eventually show the available miracles to a player, and the combat mode will allow the selection of various weapon types.  You can also minimize the Mode Selection bar.

I will be updating as often as I can on this project, and when updates take too long I'll probably end up talking about design ideas in minutia.

Also, I think I might have a few more followers from a few sources, if thats the case, please post and let me know what you would like to hear about!

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Screenshots from "Airship Game" project!






These are a series of screenshots from a small project I'm working on. It's two things, one, its a way for me to make pixel art in a goal oriented environment, and two, its kind of my pipe dream project. This is the game I would make if I didn't have to worry about money, exposure, or anything like that.

So in this game, the worlds are procedurally generated. In other words, random ,with just enough rules to make it make sense. You fly around in your airship, and colonize floating islands while harvesting resources, paying homage to ancient gods, and deal with the various horrors that occasionally come up from the depths through currents.

The eventual idea is that the enemies have routines. Some get hungry and snack on smaller ones, others might be interested in stealing your resources, or eating your settlers. None are specifically going after you just because they can, they have some basic logic. In other words, do something like build too close to an anthill, and the ants will start going after your settlements.

The other idea is that your basically confined to relatively small maps, and that you are trying to turn these things into stable colonies as soon as possible, to move onto later maps, with greater challenges and rewards.

These screenshots show most of the art assets in game, all drawn by me, on my laptop, with a mouse. The biggest ones (not counting the cloudy backgrounds) are only maybe 100x100 pixels.

Like I said, pipe dream project, but I think thats the fun part, if it never gets finished, its not a huge problem, but at the moment, if I could complete any project with no worry of money or recognition, just do what I wanted to, this would be it.