Happy Birthday, devlog!

At the start this was some sort of test, mainly for myself. Let's see if I can do regular blog posting for a while, and I was also curious how this would affect my project. I was worried, could this blog become an obstacle of sorts and slow my game development? Well, in a way it did.

Sometimes I find writing these posts a bit tricky, and it usually takes me a few days to write a single post. I think I should do this faster, like in a few hours. But yes, these usually take a few days at worst.

Why is this the case? Hard to say. Maybe I tried too much to give you any interesting content, and because of that, I think too much. Maybe I should try to be more casual this year? :)

But also, this blog has given a fixed place for people to check updates of this project. Since I do not have a Steam page. ( Yet, more about this later. ) Back then I did not have social media accounts, but I decided to give Reddit and X a chance. So today, you can get smaller updates at least on X too. Reddit I do not use so often.

But does anybody read this very blog post? I do not know. But if you do, I want to thank you!

Between 9 to 5 work and house holding, this has not always been easy to develop a game and maintain a blog about it.

One year of progress

So, what has happened so far?

In the last year, all enemies were simple geometric shapes, all weapons shot the very same bullets, weapons had no levels, and the background was a simple blue plane. And these were only a few things mentioned of the project back then.

I tried to make the best visualization of the progress, and I think I did a pretty good job:

BFG and many more updates!

Let's drive into details of what I have done during the last month. Because January was a good month in progress:

• The spawn mechanism is updated so wave enemies are randomized. No fixed enemies anymore.

• More particle effects:

  • Player destruction effects.
  • Pickable objects destruction and picking up effects.

• Base destruction effects and explosions.

• One of the weapons (BFG) got new sprites and icons.

• Sounds added for weapons and effects. Not ready, though.

• More settings, like background grid, can be disabled or enabled.

• Gamepad focus is now clearer.

• High score save and load system.

• Some cleanups and bug fixes.

Here are some GIFs for visualization:

The Alpha seems to come up nicely, but Steam pages will take an extra month after all. When I sign up for Steam's partnership, they will look into my account and its details. This will usually take a month, so there is not much I can do about it. So if you wish to wishlist, or even better, if you want to try playtesting, you'll have to wait another month at least.

Next I'll have another month planned and pretty much the same amount of tasks to do. I hope I'll keep this momentum.

One tip for the end

Nothing more this time, but one "tip" for playing this game. Do not trap yourself behind the walls, because yes, you can do that:

Cheers!

Teemu, TheAspen