100 Experience Points
An Adventure in Indie Game Development

Day 70: 27 April 2013

9:36: It feels good to be back into making my game again. The rest over the last few days, and not always having to worry about constantly going, was very nice, but I’ve missed the game development.

Here’s how I’m going to proceed. The last “real” update was day 68. It was then four days before I did anything else. (If I’m remembering correctly, I had missed a weekend during those days.) Then I did Day 72, where I had done some work on the lasers. Then it was a long time (until now) before I got back into things.

I’m going to renumber my days a bit. That day with the lasers is currently called Day 72. I’m going to call that day 69, and start with Day 70 here.

That gives me a month’s worth of days left to get this game into shape. It’s pretty evident at this point that it won’t be sellable at that point in time. In the beginning, I had hoped it would get there, but it’s not. I should have picked a simpler game.

Anyway, I’ve been at it this morning now for a little while, and wanted to put out a quick update. It has taken a little while to even remember where I was at. (The only real drawback to taking time off.) I’ve now got lasers able to actually deal damage, which is pretty cool.

Of course, when I first did it, I divided instead of multiplied, and anything that got hit with a laser was toast instantly. (Cool, but not the intended effect.)

Anyway, back to the coding now.

10:26: I wonder if anybody saw this in the earlier releases, but when lasers fire, they make all guns (maybe even ships too?) drawn after it transparent. The joys of stateful graphics cards. The lasers are drawn with additive blending turned on, and it never gets turned off.

The second I saw it, I knew what it was, but I didn’t fix it until just now.

The rest of the last little while has been in revamping the way ships take damage. This will clean up a lot of inconsistencies, and has been in the plans from the beginning. The plan is for “useful” ship parts, like engines, weapons, and radar, to take damage separately from the ship. All non-functional ship parts (the basic hull pieces) sort of share damage together. When an individual part’s strength reaches 0, it is destroyed, and whatever effects it provides is eliminated. (Dead guns don’t shoot. Dead engines can’t move the ship.) The cumulative strength of all of the hull parts equates to the ship’s strength.

What this means is that a ship can be destroyed with all engines and weapons still in tact, if the ship/hull itself has taken enough damage. Or alternatively, if you’ve picked off all of a ship’s engines, weapons, radar, etc. individually, it could be a completely useless ship that is still at full strength.

This was the way I envisioned it in the beginning, but when I’ve got it all working, and put out a new release, I’d love to get feedback from people on the way this works.

14:42: I just put out a new release, but it looks like I’ll be putting out another one shortly. For most of today, I’ve been doing a lot of cleanup of things. Weapons and taking damage should all function much better now. While I’m not even close to being done for the day, I decided to put out a new release with these fixes.

But I can clearly see that I’ve missed a couple of things, so a second update will be available shortly.

Now for a technical question. (Mostly rhetorical.) Does FTP support transactions? It makes me nervous that somebody could hit the download right in the middle of me uploading things to the website. I know a “real” website would have things built in to prevent this from even being a possibility (like a virtual IP address that can switch/load balance between two different machines) but I don’t really want to get into that right now.

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