1GAM January, third weekend update

Click to go to Battle Row
Click to go to Battle Row

Getting close to finishing my work on Battle Row, my first 1GAM submission of the year.  I’ve got bunkers that can be captured by soldiers now, a win/lose state with proper game restarts.  I also put in the ability to load up soldiers and deploy them elsewhere on the battlefield.  There’s radar, limited bomb supplies, and resources are gained from picking up coins in the field (which wasn’t in Rescue Raiders but I wanted some more activities for the player).  Most importantly, we have actual sound using the Master Audio plugin I picked up, which had some pretty nice features for the price.  Some things I’ve learned lately:

Doing the 1GAM challenge to get faster at this.  I spent a pretty solid number of nights and weekends working on Battle Row, so I need to get in a groove so I can keep up the pace.  February should be a good test since it’s such a short month.  I also need to carefully choose my objectives so that I don’t get overwhelmed.

Also, I found that free sound libraries are terrible.  I found one online so that I could have SOME sound effects at least, but generally all the free sounds on various sites are from the same original source, which in the case of weapons is some grainy 1950’s movie.  I always respected the work of audio designers, but hearing the game sound like an old Mac Plus title is pretty painful.  I’ll see if I can get some new sounds in.

Since I’m more or less ahead of schedule this time, I think I’m going to take a stab at a helicopter AI.  It won’t be great, but as long as it challenges the player more it should help somewhat.  Finally I’ll need to adjust some of the costs, damages and health levels (as well as put a cooldown on the antiair turrets) in order to make the game somewhat fun to play and win.  It has some charm but I am not as engrossed when playing than I should be.

Check out the latest build of Battle Row HERE.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *