Jam Result

Hello there! It's been some time, hm? Well, the team fixed and updated a few things on the game, but it wasn't enough to call it a new Lunar Killer version. If you want to check it out, every new step done was documented on our GitHub page.

Anyway, the libGDX Game Jam's result is out. Lunar Killer ranked 21st out of 83 games! After a lot of hard work, the team is very satisfied overall with this conclusion to the project.

I'm not sure if we've reached The End for Lunar Killer... In case of any update, we'll surely notify it on this blog. And, once again, thanks for reading! :D

First Version

Hey there! The libGDX Jam ended some hours ago, and we've submitted Lunar Killer! Honestly, it has a few bugs and isn't exactly how we intended it to be, but the team had fun and a nice experience from working on it.

Download Lunar Killer here!

To play it, download LunarKiller.zip from the above link and run LunarKillerBeta.jar as if it were an executable. You'll need Java 64 bits, version 1.7 or higher. We'd also appreciate any constructive opinion or suggestion!

So, what does the future hold for Lunar Killer? For now, we plan on hunting and fixing these wacky bugs. This blog will continue showing upgrades and nice stuff happening on the game. The code is available on our GitHub page.

Thanks for reading through these posts! We hope you'll continue following Lunar Killer!

Working Shaders & Shots

Considering the available time, we had another victory! Shaders are working and rendering okay! Here's a screenshot:

Shaders are quite magical

As you can see, boss, player and scenario are rendering accordingly. Notice also the sphere-like object between Hervog and Dr. Stone: that's a bullet, the kind that the evil doctor doesn't like. So shower him with your shots!

By holding the fire key, Hervog can charge and strike with a more powerful bullet:

Red means power here!

Hero Animations

Hervog is coming to life! Check out a quick animation test below:

Our cyborg has three animations, two of which appear on the video: moving, firing and dying.

During the movement animation, Hervog looks like he's floating, which makes sense given that the battle is in outer space. The shooting animation, with him holding his arm cannon to aim, brings Mega Man or Samus Aran to mind.

Polished Screens

Glory awaits the brave players that enter the hall of fame! Well, it's not much of a surprise since I've talked about it already on the Scores & Ranks post...

Hall of fame screen

The top 10 names and their respective scores are shown here. Also, check out the polished font: it'll be the main one seen throughout the game.

Speaking of polished things, the start menu looks better now:

Button texture and a cool font!

Many thanks to Kenney for releasing the button texture as free material! Also, the fonts were 100% free: the start menu font was made by Andrew McCluskey and the other one, by Ray Larabie from Typodermic Fonts Inc.

Music

Soundtrack is essential in any game, as it brings forth the player's emotion over a character or a scene. Since we don't have anyone skilled with music on our team, we've searched over old songs belonging to TechSchool and decided to use these two:

Opening

This piece plays during the start/end screens. It kind of gives a Quake II vibe, in my opinion. A rock theme playing on a futuristic set makes a great combination!

Battle

Soundtrack played during the battle with Dr. Stone. It continues the rock aspect of the opening theme, and builds up quite some pressure; the Earth is in danger, after all.

The Shader Challenge

This project is being quite an interesting programming challenge (at least in my greenhorn game programmer perspective). Today, I'll talk about a big, recent difficulty: shaders.

For those unfamiliar with the term, shaders are small programs that run in the GPU. They're responsible for adding special effects to sprites and models: colors on texture, production of lighting or shadow on a model, etc.
 

Shaders can activate our Moon's normals!

Sounds cool and all, right? Well, implementing them with no previous experience was a nightmare. Seriously. Since libGDX uses OpenGL for 2D and 3D rendering, shaders had to be written in GLSL, a language with a similar structure to C. Getting the hang of it was quite hard, as most tutorials I found around the Internet were too simple or too complex.

With some help, everything seemed to work out. Keep calm and carry on, right?