Here’s a short video of the player approaching a moon when the power goes out. The effects here took me quite a while to get just right, which makes the placeholder art even worse 🙁
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May 2020 Update
I have really been neglecting this blog. But I haven’t been neglecting the game.
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Progress Update 31st August 2019
Sound Effects
I’ve been progressing with the re-writing of episodes, starting with the space probe that approaches your ship. This has led to a whole bunch of sound effects and soundscapes that I’ve had to put together.
One of the things I wanted to have in The Last Boundary was nebula. They look awesome and space doesn’t look like space without them, instead it just looks like a few scattered white pixels. But because the game is supposed to be pixel-artish I had to find a way to make my noise library make pixelly images.
Here are some examples:
The single-colour examples above use 8 different colours, while the others are using 16 colours. In this article I’ll show you how I created pixelly looking nebula for The Last Boundary.
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Progress Update 28th July 2019
Based on the feedback I recieved from the few people who took the time to playtest, I’ve made some changes.
These last couple days I’ve started work on the star map. The idea is that a random number of stars, their planets, and the planets moons are generated. The numbers of star systems is somewhere between 15 and 20, maybe more or less, I’ll tweak it later. These are then arranged into “steps” according to how many minimum jumps I want the player to take to get from the current system to the destination system.
I’ve now implemented the sound a lot better, events can play sound effects. There’s also a couple of different background music tracks depending on the status of the ship.
I’ve added a main menu and title screen.
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Sound + Progress
I’ve made a lot of progress these past few days. I’ve added sound effects and music. I’ve also created a more interesting event for testing purposes, with it’s own sound effects:
Next I need to:
- Add a main menu
- Add a menu to see the crew details
- Add saving and loading of games
- Create more events
- Get some interesting graphics on the screen
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Blinking lights!
These last couple of days I’ve spent positioning and timing the blurts a little better, there’s still some work that needs to be done though. I’ve completed all of the dynamic text except for the officer names, which I’ll do once they have names, for now they don’t even exist.
I’ve added the blinking lights that change based on the alert state of the ship as well. These makes things look a lot more interesting and dynamic.
There’s still a lot to do. Next up:
- Add some graphics to the main viewer
- Position the blurts when there are multiple at once
- Add the officers names to the blurts
- Add a button that will show a “chat history” with all the previous blurts and probably previous in-game text
- Add some music
- Add some sounds effects, like a klaxon for the red alert state and a sonar ping for the green state
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Nearly playable
I’ve got an extremely short episode written that contains what I think is most of the elements to the game. Right now I’ve got a sort of playable thing happening except for variable text. There are variable options and blurts said by your bridge crew as well as random ones, but the text displayed to the player isn’t variable yet.
A gif to demonstrate.
