5 years. It's been five years. Made some big changes in my life back then. Chased a different career. Liked it. Still like it. Though with the way things have been changing, feeling the need for some of my own change.
I decided to buckle down and actually try to go at app development. With a bad addiction to idle games as is, that's were I wanted to start. I picked up Unity a couple years ago, after plenty of experimenting, tutorials out the wazzu and I started various iterations. From rogueLike short idle games, to big crusader kings style idle games. Horizontal layouts and vertical, the later being my preferred. I feel you can get more information out of a horizontal layout. Just feels better in my hands with the vertical layout. Along the way I purchased a wacom tablet, been wanting one for so long, dont know why I never got one before. Still hard to get used to the coordination, but its a ton of fun.
Same goes for gamedev, this site has change alot since I last blogged. But I hope you all can join on the adventure of releasing a game and the struggle of making it pay.
I chose to go with the space ship theme, I like the more stream line approach the most. I want it to focus on upgrading one thing, you're making the ship preform better. Everything revolves around the ship, it moves faster, it shoots harder, it collects more gold. Alot of my iterations kept feeling complicated just for the sake of having more to do. there'd be tabs with stuff to upgrade your gold, and tabs that would increase the things that increased your gold, and so on. In the end I went with the prestige upgrades concept, everything is upgradeable with one type of resource, with one specific upgrade. No spider web of this upgrades this that upgrades this.
So I present:
Idle Space Ship
Pre-Release version
I've implemented the base version, with the basic game loop. Upgrade your ship and get to the furthest planet you can. When things get slow, you can prestige to get tokens for permanent upgrades that wont reset when you prestige. The game will be available November 18-20th only on the google play store.
I got several planned features before Ill consider this complete.
Asteroids - To even out the income rate, and gonna be the underlying frame work for the combat system. On top of upgrading speed, I'll be adding a laser gun to the ship. As you progress to each planet, random asteroids will be floating around for you to pick off and earn money from. You'll have to keep up with the strength of the asteroids, as each one needs to be destroyed to collect the money from them.
Collectables - I'll be adding collectable items, that will randomly appear in some asteroids. Collect full sets to receive big bonuses. Along with this Ill be adding a plethora of new galaxy backgrounds and special asteroids. The new asteroids can only appear in their galaxies. These asteroids will guarantee items from specific sets. To make it a little less random, I'm opting towards letting the player choose one galaxy each prestige.
Combat - That's right, combat. I'll start designating every 10th planet as a boss planet. These planets will be protected but ships that will shoot back at you. The last main upgrade, Shields will be added to the ship. Combat will be continuous and basically just like the asteroids. The only difference is the ships cant be passed, failure to kill them before reaching them, will force you to slow down and kill them. death wont be the end of you though. Farming mode will be changed to restarting you on the planet and enemy ships cant appear while farming. This will allow you to upgrade if you cant defeat the ships present.
Expect random encounters on non boss planets too, you just wont see big groups of them.
Till release, happy coding and I hope to be back with more soon.
