Monday 30 October 2017

Weekly Development Progress Report, 30/10/17

Another week done, and another month nearly done too. I can't believe how fast this year has gone. I had a really busy week last week, in terms of hours worked it was one of the best of the year so far, and so I'm pretty close to making my hours target for the month despite having to take a few days off for various reasons.
That thinking feeling
It's the most zombieful time of the year!
As I said last week, the Zombie Cannon Attack! Halloween Horror update is out on several platforms (a full list is at the bottom of this post) and if you feel like getting in the Halloween spirit by sending a rampaging zombie horde up against a forest full of witches then you should definitely give the game a try.
In the event of a Zombie Apocalypse, pumpkins don't make good barricades. I've tested it so you don't have to.
Now that I've taken it as far as I intend to, both in terms of platforms to release on and updates to the game itself, I'm planning to do a proper postmortem soon (hopefully next week), but I think now's as good a time as any to give a brief update on how things are going in a more general sense.

I started the year with the hope that I could make some sort of career out of making games, but also with an understanding that this was a long shot and pretty unlikely to happen. Indeed it's such a long shot that I can't honestly say I even considered it plan A. I've mainly been teaching myself to code with the intention of pursuing a career as a web developer, which is why I chose to make html5 games in javascript to maximise the crossover between gamedev and webdev. I had hoped that I could make enough money to supplement my savings while I continued learning, but it's been clear to me for months now that this is also pretty unlikely so lately I've been putting more time into web development and less into games.

I've learned a huge amount this year and really enjoyed doing it, I'm still making games (see below) but I've come to accept that it's part hobby, part means to an end (the end being learning programming) and shifted my focus accordingly. Still, if me from 5 years ago had been told I'd have learned to code and released a few games by now I know he/I'd have been pretty impressed.

Let's slice things up a little

As I said at the start of this post, it's been a busy week. Despite the slightly negative overview I've just written I'm pretty happy with how things are going in general and with the new game. I've now got a vertical slice of the game completed and things are starting to come together. Although it's all still very basic and filled with placeholder graphics, you can at least complete the games basic cycle.

As a player you can kill bad guys, collect resources, sell the resources to artisans (well one artisan at the moment). The artisan can then craft equipment (guns only at the moment) which you can then buy from them and equip on your character, then go back out hunting for more resources. Now that one artisan and one equipment slot is working it's just a matter of fairly repetitive copying, pasting and amending to get the others working. Once that's all done I can start focusing more on minor things like graphics and gameplay. Maybe I'll even have a few screenshots before too much longer.


That's all for this week, thanks for reading. If you want to keep up to date you can also follow me on Twitter.
My latest game, Zombie Cannon Attack!, is available on all these platforms:
Android
itch.io (desktop download)
Gamejolt (web & desktop)
Kongregate (web)
Give it a try and let me know what you think, feedback is always welcome.

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