Broadside is set somewhere in the depths of space where three opposing factions are raging war for universal dominance.
After choosing your faction and starting as a small fighter, work your way up through the military destroying ships and collecting salvage until you eventually become a broadside vessel. Then the real struggle begins as you try to turn the tides of war on the opposing factions in this score based, top down survival shooter.
the 1st couple of weeks
So it’s officially been two weeks since we started work on our space shooter “Broadside”. Ross has been hard at work DESIGNING AND getting the art assets ready for IMPORTING INTO THE alpha build; focusing on the Blue and red factions. Making sure that each faction has its own unique feel that resonates across each class of ship.
we are allowing OURSELFS one month to complete A BASIC PROOF OF CONCEPT DEMO. FOCUSING ON the player controlled Blue faction, whilst using Red as the enemy faction. Pete and Dave have been busy prototyping the game in the Construct2 engine. Putting in placeholder assets, and working on the players mechanics such as controls, movement and the ship/weapon upgrade system.
One mechanic we are happy with is the ability to have the games viewport zoom out as the player upgrades their ship; which will allow for a great sense of size when attacking smaller or larger vessels. A similar mechanic is used effectively in the game slither.io
Its’s an exciting time AND we are all quickly thinking of new and interesting mechanics to help the final game stand out; we only hope this doesn’t impact the length of the games development.
So we have decided that we are going to fill all you lovely viewers in every 2 weeks with an update on Broadsides development. As it happens a lot has been going on; we managed to hit our construct 2 deadline. The alpha prototype does most of the basic mechanics the main game will include, but in a very ruff form.
Creating this prototype was useful to us as it has helped us think about the challenges we need to overcome in the main game, not only that but whilst playing thought of interesting new elements that we want to include. Like mini randomised in game objectives that will reward the player with a bonus amount of salvage if fulfilled. Also failing these objectives will have a negative effect on your factions overall strength on the map.
Speaking of maps; this is one thing we sorely need for the game as we don’t want the player getting lost in the depths of space. Other things we learnt from this alpha was we need more complex AI and in game obstacles such as asteroids and small moons.
4 Weeks in or so
One word would sum up the past two weeks dev on Broadsides “Unity”. We have imported all the current done game assets by putting them onto large sprite sheets; something we found will help with the games memory storage over importing them all as separate art assets. Then made new sprites from this, added collisions and animations then placed them into a prefabs folder that we can pull from.
Also we are now working in code and not just logic nodes that construct2 uses and have been working on some of the key player controls such as movement, health and salvage pick up.
around 6 weeks in
8 weeks and counting
So it’s the end of the 2nd month of dev here on Broadsides and the Unity build now has code in for player movement, salvage pick up and the beginnings of the game’s AI. This month has in general been one of set up, getting ready for next month where Broadsides should start feeling more like a game and in a similar condition as the Construct2 demo. Except the Unity build will have the ability to be a lot more mouldable as itis our code now not logic blocks.
Art wise we have worked on the game’s backgrounds; figuring out that each faction’s area will be colour coordinated so the player will have a better bearing on where they are on the map and where to escape to if they need healing. Speaking of maps we have designed a new in hud that shows a mini map in the bottom right corner similar to that used in games like Slither.io.
10 weeks deep
Lots have been getting done behind the scenes in the land of code the past two weeks. This includes player ship attachments like weapons and thruster animations, getting to grips with the enemy AI and adding in the score and salvage pick up values.
Art wise we have implemented the new detailed backgrounds for each faction. Tiling them to allow better performance, as although Unity can handle large amounts of pixel and animations, from research and previous experience we know the RAM in phones won’t handle it too well. As well as this, to give the sense of a more believable space we are putting in a twinkling particle effect to represent the stars in the galaxy.
Of course game dev wouldn’t be the same without a couple of hiccups. This came in the form of in-game assets getting corrupted; something that was easily fixed but tedious. On the plus side we had just finished off the redesign of the red and green faction units and so imported them along with the rest.
12 weeks and then some
It has been a manic two weeks for us here as we try and get as many gameplay mechanics as possible ready for our next big deadline. With the main focus on putting in code for more advanced enemy AI which has taken a lot of the time. As well as starting the upgrade menu,this includes a pause feature. Another hurdle we had to overcome is making sure the in game HUD resizes correctly depending on what device the game will be playing on.
We have also been discussing how the game is going to look when you load it up and what the faction select screen is going to look like. Remembering that this is built for mobile play and so needs to be as user friendly and readable as possible
A few months later:
It’s been a busy and productive set of months game devving, with progress being made in leaps and bounds. So in order of how the game has been shaping up: We spent around a month sorting out touch controls and writing custom code, whilst working on the games menus and title screen. It was also a month when we realised the game would benefit heavily from having an extended deadline, as we wanted to add more to the core game play and produce a more polished product.
The next month was spent getting it working on Android devices and implementing core code for ship upgrades and weapon attachments, as well as testing the touch controls we had coded the previous month. Design wise it was also the month we decided that the game needed a stronger reason for this war to be constantly going on. We settled on an ancient relic in space that each one of the three factions would have ties to. This not only gave each faction purpose but also a focal point for all the combat. Art wise we got on designing this, as well as giving the factions more personality with custom icons on the faction selection screen.
After that productive month we worked on the core code for the blue faction; with the aim to get all the mechanics working perfectly for one of the factions and then duplicating this code for the other two. This was harder than we thought as small road blocks and conflicting code appeared. Art wise we continued to make each faction feel more unique by having each weapon for each faction have a different look and animation and started taking making the HUD slightly different for each faction.
With that stressful month out of the way, things next month seemed to just fit into place. With the game’s remaining main mechanics all coming together and though a slight comprise had to be made in regards to combat, the core idea of side by side skirmishing has been kept. The Blue code; which has been the guinea pig for all the code was then duplicated to the remaining Green and Red factions. With the next step being mechanic tweaking to make sure the game is fun and ready for stress testing. The implementation of a new HUD for each faction was put in place and tweaks done to assets such as health stations round out what was a very successful set of weeks.
So we started game play testing and realised there was quite a few issues regarding the games core mechanics. Primarily to do with the games AI; which so your aware revolves around having 3 different factions constantly battling it out without any input from the Player. With different kinds of enemies in the forms of attackers and scouts (which hunt for parts). Another element to the Ai revolves around having a constant populated battle ground. Having respawn code that recognises when a ship is destroyed and spawns a new one for the faction that requires it. This is complex code that just isn’t doing what we want it to. The main issue being that the enemy factions focus more on the player rather than attacking each other which leads to one sided fights, where the Ai will always win! This has led us to rework a lot of code, which we are dummying on the blue faction.
With only a couple of months before the game is to be released we are defiantly feeling the crunch. That being said every day it is evolving and improving, with new Ai being put in place and added polish in the form of new particle effects and damage frames.
The Crunch is On!
A month until lift off!
The past couple of weeks, and going forward until the end of this project, are all about fixing bugs, testing and trying to implement some of the mechanics we had to cut earlier on in the game’s development. Trying to manage working part time jobs at the same time as game development is never an easy task, made harder when the game is only a few weeks to release and you’re nailing out bugs. Dave especially though has been knuckling down and sorting the project out as every day a new APK of the build is up for test; then we testers download and break it in interesting ways and send back a bug/note report, though the number of issues is getting smaller each time.
Just so you have an idea at one of the many bugs we encountered though out the past weeks:
(Player ship starts and doesn’t stop firing after it has started: at the start of the game it isn’t firing as nothing is around, after it has started firing after it has noticed the first enemy the ship never stops. We tested this by going to the edge of the map and pointing out of bounds (and still kept firing). This also happens when upgrading to a new ship: once upgraded if no enemies are around it doesn’t spam fire, however, once it has started the ship doesn’t stop.)
Art wise we have added polish with static background assets in the form of ship wrecks to give the game a sense that the war between the three factions has been going on for centuries. We have also added space cloud overlays to give the game more depth and to hide background tile edges.
