I just finished up a basic tutorial for the game. The tutorial is on rails right now, so if you veer off-course, it’s probably unforgiving. I’ll need to have some friends play test it while I watch, see where they get confused, whether they listen to the dialogs or accidentally dig themselves a grave. This tutorial is a good stepping stone for creating more complex scenarios, a lot of the bits and pieces are together and ready to go.

There’s still a lot of work to do on the game, sadly. At least it’s getting to a point where it’s playable. Once it’s playable (and hopefully enjoyable), I can start improving things one by one.

IndieDB has been kind enough to accept my game in to their database. You can watch my progress over there now too. I’m still not quite sure I’m going to put over there except duplicate blog entries & screens, but it should bring in a little traffic.

I’ve added some progress bars & icons for various changing values for the selected unit. It looks pretty good. Here’s a video of it. As usual, it’s best viewed at 720p and up

I had a spurt of energy a couple nights ago and found myself working AngularJS in to my HUD. It’s really making the HUD’s code cleaner and easier to follow because I’m moving my HTML templates out of my JavaScript and back into the HTML where it belongs. You be the judge, here’s a JSFiddle with my console code from before, and after Angular.

I’ve started to participate in #screenshotsaturday on twitter. The idea is that game developers like myself post a screenshot of their work on Saturdays. There’s a pretty cool website that collects all of the tweets and displays all of the Saturday screenshots, aptly named screenshotsaturday.com. Here’s my entry from last week where I added a power indicator for the solar station that will fade away at further viewing distances (click to enlarge):

And my entry for today, where I’ve started to create a missile launcher.

So yeah, I have finally added something to the game, can you beleive it? Nor can I. The missiles still don’t do any damage, they’ll just fly straight through the enemy ship and continue to accelerate into oblivion, but it’s a start.

My laser tower, spaceship, and beacon are back! I still haven’t thought about how I want to network this stuff, but that will come.

I just released alpha5 for Asteroid Outpost on Bitbucket, along with a changelog. It doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of new content really, but I have completely rewritten both the UI and Entities, so I’ll push this out now in hopes that my next release will be just around the corner. Now to get my laser tower working again…

I can’t say that my game is a game again, but I’ve re-built the solar station, laser miner, and power node. I built the power node most recently, and it was eaaasy to do because I just slapped existing components together and gave it a name. The more components I build, the easier it’s going to be to build new entities from them. If things keep up, maybe I’ll be able to add something new before Christmas!

I’ve had to break almost everything in my game. So much so that it’s easier to list things that I didn’t break. Why did everything break? Because I have deleted my entire Entity class hierarchy. No more Asteroid class, SolarStation class, LaserMiner class, etc. All gone, and good riddance!

Instead, I have been converting piece after piece into data-driven components with systems that process lists of these components. There is a great 5-part blog series on this topic over at T-Machine. I’ll describe what I’ve done once I manage to get a little more working. So far, I only have a single asteroid that consists of nothing more than a few components. It may not sound like a lot, but it is a great start to a data-driven game.