Weeks 146-147-148: Wasteland Standoff! (Patreon)

Weeks 146 and 147 were supposed to see the last of that minimalist RTS, from the last weekly recap. Sadly, that quite didn't happen and that game remains unfinished for now. (I'll write about it further down this post)

But last week I've worked on something else! And that actually got finished! I did a collab with Eliott and we made Wasteland Standoff, a permanent deathmatch in the desert, where one bullet will kill you!

Eliott is a very good friend of mine and lately I've been helping him get into game development. I thought it would help him a lot to bring him along into a very short (but serious) project and that's what Wasteland Standoff is!

Eliott did most of the gameplay code, while I took care of the spritework, the map, the sound effects and the network code. We decided the design of the game together at the very beginning and then throughout the week as the game took shape.

It went really well and was a very positive experience! The only bad side is that we had to keep on working a bit throughout the week-end to finish the game, but that might have been to be expected.

I had most fun working on the sprites and on the map, both of which I'm really proud of! This project is something we already tried to do sometime last year with SUGAR and we weren't able to finish it then, but I had made sprites for it and that's what we used at the beginning of last week.

This worked ok but I wanted to make it a lot better and... I honestly surprised myself. It really feels good to notice how much you've progressed at doing something!

On the design side, we went with something very safe, to make sure the project wouldn't take more than 5 days. (nevermind that it did anyway) It's an online competitive top-down shooter, with up to 16 players in one session, where one bullet will suffice to kill you and reset your score. Bullets ricochet on walls and can  be stopped by cacti, which also gets destroyed. (but grow back after a while) The map is hand-made, with a set of hand-picked spawn points.

We released the game just yesterday on Monday and had a first game session and, apart from a few errors and bugs, it went really well! The game is simple but works really well and is fun!

You can play it on Castle through this page!

(if nobody's on the game, come to Castle's Discord or to the Patreon exclusive Trasevol Club Discord to ask if anyone wants to play!)

I have a name for this game now! It shall be called BotJuice!

BotJuice's design took a slightly new direction with a system of orders that you give to your little robots in order to take control of the map and cover it with bot juice!

Since the last Weekly Recap, a lot of work went into building the network side of the game, alterating the UI for the design changes and simply making sure everything worked correctly.

Sadly the game's design still feels incomplete at the moment, especially because there's nothing limiting the resources you can produce in the game and so you can hoard them from the very start and then never give it a second thought. Apart from that, there's still no lobby (before the game starts) nor gameover condition.

It's difficult to say how much time it will take to finish this game but I'm hopeful that two weeks will be enough.

Yet I'm not working on this game this week! Since last week was pretty intense, I decided to take some rest this week, which will also allow me to take care of some personal stuff and also maybe make a tiny game thing that's been sitting in a corner of my head for a few weeks. We'll see!

As usual I want to thank my Patreon supporters for their invaluable support! Here are the names of the 3$+ supporters:

★Joseph White, ★Spaceling, rotatetranslate, Anne Le Clech, bbsamurai, HJS, slono, Austin East, Jefff, Meru, Bitzawolf, Paul Nguyen, Dan Lewis, Christian Östman, Dan Rees-Jones, Reza Esmaili, Andreas Bretteville, Joel Jorgensen, Marty Kovach, Giles Graham, Flo Devaux, Cole Smith, Thomas Wright, HERVAN, berkfrei, Tim and Alexandra Swast, Jearl, Chris McCluskey, Raphael Gaschignard, Eiyeron, Sam Loeschen, Andrew Reitano, amy, Johnathan Roatch, yunowadidis-musik, Max Cahill, hushcoil, Jacel the Thing, Gruber, Pierre B., Sean S. LeBlanc, Andrew Reist, vaporstack, Jakub Wasilewski

If you are a supporter, please let me know what you'd like to see more of from me! More games? More pixel-art? More write-ups? (it's been a while I know :X) You can tell me here in the comments or in the Patreon-exclusive Discord!

Have a great week!

Take care!

TRASEVOL_DOG