Hello!
For about 10 months now I have been working on a game heavily inspired by the 2002 game Defender (a kind of remake of the popular arcade game of the same name), with additional inspiration coming from other games like Star Fox.
I loved the combination of shoot-em-up elements and tower defense elements Defender had, so I wanted to expand upon that in sort of a spiritual successor while taking cues from other popular games like it. I also am very interested in space, star systems and worlds outside of our own Solar System, so making a game in a world based around this stuff is really cool.
So now that I am a good ways into development, I have started posting dev blogs talking about the various aspects of making Planetguard. I want to cover everything from technical implementations, methods of creating game art, and the science behind it all.
The dev blogs are hosted on my website: https://roadturtlegames.com/planetguard/
Also on that page you’ll find the first drafts of many of my design documents, available as PDFs.
And I have a Twitter account set up where you can follow the progress: https://twitter.com/PlanetguardGame
In my most recent dev blog, for instance, I talk about the science and implementation behind how I make realistic stars. For fun I plugged in values from real stars into my editor utilities and the results look pretty nice:
When I can, I like to include downloads for the stuff I talk about in the dev blogs. For this particular one I have a free download for the scripts and shaders I use to author my stars.
I also have some videos I’d like to share. This first one is the first test I made when I was only starting to learn DOTS and ECS:
A much more recent video showing a concept of the gameplay with better assets (some made by me, others from free asset packs):
Showing off a rough draft of my enemy AI:
So yeah, I’ll be sure to update here as well as Twitter whenever I post a new dev blog!
