Today, I updated the equipment rack sprites to give them the same aesthetic as the rest of the buildings. They now fit in a lot better.

I've made a ton of behind-the-scenes changes that I should really have written down. They include knocking guards and farmers in the air when getting hit, gibs that spew out of dead enemies, and showing item prices in the Build menu. Add a few dozen small improvements to how things work and there you have it.

On another note, I've had the concept below in my head since the jam period ended, so I might give them a shot in the future.

I started working on a much-needed new enemy, called the hunter (again, name might change in the future). They run faster than guards and even the player, so you'll want to beef up your defenses to deal with them. They also like spawning behind the slower roamers, using them as meatshields until they can close in.

Work-in-progress animations below :)

Implemented the guard towers. They are upgradable and garrisonable. I still need to improve the system so that multiple guards can use them at the same time, but that won't be too hard. I love how easy it is to add new behaviors to the AI with the state machine I have written, it makes developement very fast and iterative.

I'm not sure how to orient the weapons of the guards yet, though, since it's all pixel art. I hope i don't have to do multiple frames for it.

I'm 100% done with refactoring the peon AI! To celebrate, I'm having wine and chocolate for dinner.

I've also started messing with guard towers. They are defensive buildings that can be upgraded a number of times, and peons will climb up there to shoot at their enemies from relative safety. I'm thinking of adding mounted weapons to them, but maybe that's just the feature-creep talking.

Have a great weekend everybody :)

Adding debug info to things - especially AI - is a must. So i did just that using the tiniest font i could find.

Still working on enemy/peon AI. Having to streak.club has a good influence on me.

I'm stuck in this refactoring process, and I haven't had much time to work on things today. The peons are getting there: they now wander around, pick up tools, and farm if they can. I still need to rewrite the peon-enemy interactions.

I'll post some more exciting stuff in the future :)

Hey streakers, I'm halfway through refactoring peons using the new state machine, so today is a boring update. Even this dude fell asleep as I wrote it.

Lots of behind-the-scenes work was accomplished today. I wrote an actual state machine that's easy to attach to any entity, and now it's just of matter of implementing it on the enemies and peons. It's implemented on the player and deleting a ton of 'if' statements and booleans was very satisfying. Nothing to show, though, since the player acts the same :P

On the art side, I added a couple of frames to the player sprite, so that they're holding a tablet device when deciding what to build. I also pixeled some walls, as you can see below.

Short update again: implemented actually placing building with the new UI. I will make this look more hologram-y and intuitive in a future update. For now, I just needed to get it working again.

Today is Saturday, so it's time for lots of beer and tons of Diablo 3. I've made some art though! I wrapped up the running animation for a new enemy (codenamed 'Hunter' for now). This cute little critter runs faster than bullets and has four eyes that allow it to track anything in the dark.

I also made a background for UI elements, that I nine-slice using Kyle Pulver's NineSlice class for Flashpunk. I wanted it to look monitory-y so I changed the font color to a blueish tone that I think fits pretty well.

Have a great weekend!

Note to self: stick to this.

Last weekend, I made a game in 48 hours. It's called Bizarre Harvest Conspiracy, and it's a 2D Sidescrolling Farming Survival Simulator™. It's inspired by Noio's Kingdom and the Game Name simulator. I am pretty happy with how far I got for the jam, but it obviously needs improvements. Lots of UI and balancing work must be done.

Today, I started reworking the Build menu. In the jam version, the user had to press B to open the menu, then use 1-9 to select items, and Backspace/Escape to go back one level, and Enter to build. It worked, but the UX was terrible and non-intuitive (see first gif).

The reworked version still has the user press B to open the menu, and then the navigation is all done with left/right/up/down (both AWSD and arrow keys). The menus are also left-aligned and expand to the right (see second gif).