Devlog 3 - The Fourth Day

Day 4

The fourth day, today as a TL;DR I did:

• Added Saving
• Added a broken way to load saves
• Added all of the planet / asteroid sprites into the game
• Added move tool
• Added a temporary scene before main menu for early builds
• Improved collision box for some planets
• Added collisions between different sprites.
• Learned orbits are a bit broken with multiple planets orbiting.

For the longer explanation of what I did and why, I started by working on the save system. I had started on it the day prior but it wasn’t finished. I decided to do loading in a similar way to saving as well, through an extension, to help save time coding. However although some dat can be loaded as a variable, not enough is loaded at the moment to load sprites.

Afterwards I realised that incase I don’t or can’t finish on time and forget to upload a final build, it will be best to add a temporary build to the project page so that I at least have something people can rate. However because it will likely change afterwards, I added a temporary scene to remind players, things can and will change before voting starts.

The next thing I did was improved the collision box for the first medium planet as I realised it was still a square and I wanted to add a collision system to the game but it won’t work well if every object has collision boxes that are squares, taking up unnecessary area so there will be gaps. Once this was done, I could easily add the collision system which I did by using the separate action because of two reasons. First it’s one line of code so saves time. Secondly, I tested it afterwards and it seemed to work well.

I then thought about testing multiple objects in orbits because I hadn’t actually tested that prior and I would need to make sure it works going forward however I then realised it wasn’t working so I will have to fix that tomorrow.

Finally to finish off the day, since it wouldn’t take much code I added a basic move tool that allowed objects to be moved around so I can end on a positive note making me feel more positive and as a result more motivated for this game jam and also it adds a useful tool for players to play with.

Thanks for reading.