10
votes
What creative projects have you been working on?
This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.
Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.
If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.
I finally released my little roguelike project. It's inspired by Hoplite on Android. Basically movement is key, you get an upgrade each level and after 8 levels it just becomes an endless wave defense until you die and set a high score.
(my best score is 514)(I changed the scoring. My best score is now 134)itch.io link
Just broke 100! The triangles keep sniping me while dealing with the hordes of weaker opponents lol. I'll work this into my casual game rotation; just something to do for a few minutes on break :)
I may have found some kind of bug? Once I got to Lvl 8, Wave 1, I get this black box that prevents me from doing anything further. I left one of those snipers alive at the end of Lvl 8, perhaps that has something to do with it?
I'll play with this some more later, see if I can replicate it.
EDIT: cleared all enemies of Lvl 8, still stuck at this black box screen. If this behavior is intended, it's not clear how to move onward from here; clicked a bunch of stuff, smashed the keyboard, nothing. I have to close the program and re-open.
Haven't played Hoplite, but I think this is a clever little game. Economy of Movement is certainly key to getting a high score. Railgun + Movement Upgrade are what I've been going for, and I don't find myself really using the leash at all.
I'm not game designer, but as a player I was confused at first how my movement had been upgraded—clicking on my player icon just gave me the border of six blue hexagons, which is not accurate after the upgrade.
It can be a little tricky to remember what upgrades I've purchased too, playing several games in a row. Forgetting if I've bought the movement upgrade on a playthrough is the biggest headache, but some indication of which weapon I have (other than aiming and seeing what's possible to hit) would be nice.
If I could be so bold as to make a recommendation, it would be a big Quality of Life improvement if I could see my full attack range somehow—similar to movement range being displayed by clicking my player icon.
I'll be sure to play with this some more. While I'm pleased with my 258 score, it'll be interesting to see if I could get that now-unrealistic 514+ ;)
gg @mgr
Thanks for giving it a go!
I agree with your suggestions around quality of life changes. The display of movement/attack ranges is definitely in need of some love! I need to put together some more icons so that everything is distinct and then I can probably add them along the bottom of the blue border or something.
Regarding the black box thing, I reckon I know what that is, the upgrades have a minimum level and a maximum level and I bet I'm filtering it where the current level is less than the max level instead of less than or equal to. I'm busy tonight but I'll have a look at that when I get a chance so you can get back to kicking my ass ;)
I've rolled an update out on Itch. You should see BETA.4 now on the page.
Any particular strats for getting past ~150? I'm hitting a ceiling around that mark
Oh crap I just realised I totally made a tweak to the amount of score you gain between levels!! 514 is probably a bit unrealistic now! You're officially past my top score under the new system
I find circling around backwards to keep enemies at arm's reach is the key. One thing I haven't done yet is make it obvious that you can click on the enemies to see their attack radius. If you take it slow, you can generally thread the needle around the triangles' attacks but sometimes you need to just take the hit to get out of the way. With an upgraded chain range you can out-range them and pull them in to shoot them too.
I'm learning electronics. I soldered a microcontroller board and I'm very excited about it! it works!
So last week I talked about putting together a nice screen unit for a spare MiSTer I have, but in reality I didn't do anything because it's taking much longer than expected for the panel and electronics to be shipped to me. Tracking says that it's in the US but for some reason it hasn't moved for the past three days. This really sucks because I can't even work on prototype designs because I don't have exact dimensions even from the original panel manufacturer. I probably shouldn't complain about the slow shipping because I paid so little for it, but at the same time it's making me feel like it's being smuggled into the country or something.
Honestly, though? It's kind of perfect that it didn't get here because it's making me really focus on relaxing, which is something I have needed to do for a while.
I've also been doing rough sketches with OpenSCAD to see how realistic it would be to design this project with it and it may end up being easier than I imagined. I still want to do it in Fusion 360 just for the practice, but I am finding it extremely obtuse. There's some kind of internal logic that it's expecting me to understand but it isn't giving me a way to understand what that logic actually is. The thing that bothers me is that there are so many videos that cover how to use it, but they only cover the how and not the why, and so when I try to use the same tools with my own designs things just don't work!
The screen finally came last weekend, but I didn't get a chance to do anything because I had to take an emergency trip to Las Vegas for a family member. But this last weekend (which for me is Sunday-Monday) I was able to power through a lot of things.
Somehow I didn't think about how to power this whole project, but thankfully I was able to order the stuff I needed off of Amazon to get them on time so I could have the measurements for everything. The driver board I purchased accepts anywhere between 5-12 volts, which is perfect since the MiSTer also takes 5V. I didn't know how much power it would draw so I went somewhat overboard by purchasing a Meanwell LRS-100-5 which can handle up to 90W.
This weekend I finished designing version 0. I did active design work; for each component that needs to be installed I created and printed a test peice to make sure it would be able to properly mount where they needed to go. I found that that portion of the design process really helped me out because I had a "cutout" piece that I could use so I could visualize the space inside and make sure everything will fit without having to print anything.
But what I did not do was design anything in Fusion360. Part of the problem with it was that it wasn't available on the computer I was sitting at; it's easier to get OpenSCAD running than it is to deal with autodesk's crappy DRM, especially considering that their program is still fairly alien to me. Thankfully I was able to get some nice bevels after learning more about Minkowski sums (though I still don't really understand how hey work). I find that being able to write math equations and have parameters that I can change afterwords really helps speed things up.
The front case portion finished printing last night and right now I'm waiting for the rear portion to complete. After that I have three places to check that make up the mounting/rotation system.
I had a broken set of bluetooth headphones lying around. They snapped in half and one of the speakers was broken. So rather than throw it out I removed the two speakers and wired them to an audio jack. Then I packaged the whole thing into a little box shape with all the superfluous bits of casing removed.
The result was a little box, that pairs with my phone over bluetooth, which I can plug into any speaker with an audio jack, turning it into a bluetooth enabled speaker. It's got a real cobbled together aesthetic to it too, which is exactly what I was going for.
I know for a fact my parents have some old speakers from the nineties lying around in the attic somewhere so maybe two bits of obsolete electronics put together will make something useful.