Others Seduction Defense Force [DevLog]

[GM_Silver]

Spoiler: Slight background

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Seduction Defense Force!

As an SDF Commander, it is your duty to defend innocent villagers against the unending hordes of vicious monsters. Since the hordes are unending, it's a good thing that all SDF personnel are possessed of a special talent: lust magic! So throw yourself into the front lines, fuck those monsters, and use the collected lust to build your army and repel the invaders!

Spoiler: Current State of the Game

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Spoiler: Planned Features

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Spoiler: Setting Expectations

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If any of this sounds fun or awesome or exciting to you, pop in and say something! I (like many creatives) thrive on interaction and the idea that others will like what I create.

 

[GM_Silver]

Some progress!

The basic enemy template progresses from right to left in a straight line. The basic tower shoots at them, but can't keep up.
So you gotta get in there and fight yourself!!

Too bad the combat is uh..... well, it needs some refinement...


But hey, at least the bones of a system are here. Besides, the combat is a lot less important in a game like this. It's more of a stopgap. Ideally you'll have enough towers to handle everything and spend all your time fucking the monsters for extra lust/mana/whatever.

Next up on the dev list is my personal LEAST FAVORITE task when making any game: the meta structure and user interface. I just don't get much joy out of programming and implementing resource bars/gauges, win/loss mechanics, round structures, and MENUS! Dear god, the menus. Just kill me now...

But it must be done!

 

[GM_Silver]

Some more progress!

We now have a semblance of a menu! While the gif below probably doesn't LOOK impressive, there's actually a ton of background work that goes into making something as simple as "press tab to open the summoning menu."

The important stuff for this little update is that the game is now a pseudo-state-machine. Certain functions will be suspended (or fail to start completely) if the game is in the wrong phase. The pausing that you're seeing here is moving the game from "fight" to "command" and back again.

The other thing that's important here is that Gamemaker doesn't have ANY built-in user interface stuff, so I have to program it all by hand. My big triumph here is making those buttons highlight (using assets purchased from itch.io because I hate drawing UI even more than I hate programming it). I'm also proud of the cascading structure of my menus and buttons, wherein my menus construct their own buttons according to pre-programmed criteria and all I have to do to get the menu is instantiate its object.

Anyway here's the gif:


As you can see, it needs refinement. The oversized tower sprites will be fixed by me making button-specific tower sprites instead of being lazy and just slapping the existing sprite in there.

 

[GM_Silver]

More progress!

There's some weirdness deforming the menu buttons a little, but that's only noticeable to me because I can see what it's SUPPOSED to look like in the room editor.

In any case, you can now pause the game, select a tower (there's only one, but there's five buttons for it lmao), and place it on the map! You can't place it beyond the borders of the room, and you can't place it inside another tower's bounding box.
It doesn't consume any resources yet. There aren't any resources at all yet, in fact. But that'll be easy enough to implement, tbh. For now, behold the glorious gif!


Next up is those pesky resources and other such things.

 

[GM_Silver]

Even more progress!

This one is a big one: the wave and spawn systems. These are probably the most important systems for a tower defense game, and they can be pretty complicated so I'm glad they're out of the way for now.

Basically, I've made a gamestate manager that keeps track of waves and a wave manager that spawns everything in the current wave. It's important to have the enemies spawn in a reasonably natural-looking pattern and pace, as well as have multiple enemy types evenly distributed. Without going into all the annoying math and index management, I'll just say I accomplished this and I have a solid headache.

Behold the gif!


I can't upload longer gifs than this, so you'll just have to trust me that waves 2-7 work just as well. Additionally, I've implemented a per-round HP. If you let 5 monsters through in a single wave, you lose. That's functioning, too.

Next up I've gotta jump back into the User Interface Hellhole to get the wave HP, wave percentage, and wave number all displaying on screen.

 

[GM_Silver]

Guys I need you to understand the pain and suffering I endured today. I don't know how to communicate it to you properly, but today's progress was purchased with blood, sweat, and tears.

Mostly tears. So many tears.

Today I built the upgrading system for towers and the upgrade tree for the SDF commander. It involved a lot of finagling precise positioning, wracking my brain to visualize data structures, and all those tears I mentioned. The result is the following:

• A structure that holds 9 upgrades per tower and 9 upgrades for the Commander
• Information boxes that automatically resize themselves to hold their contents, within limitations you specify
• Hovering over an upgrade button changes the text in the info box so you know what it is
• That doesn't sound like much
• But please understand that in Gamemaker I had to build all of that functionality FROM SCRATCH
• My friend who uses Godot says that program has a bunch of built-in GUI stuff
• Gamemaker doesn't yet

Anyway, behold the gif!

The little number beneath her feet is her ATK, so you can see that it's improving with the upgrades haha

So tomorrow is probably going to focus on the towers. I've decided that they'll be Wind, Ice, Fire, and Earth, and I know what each one will do, roughly speaking. I'll at least want to get the "Basic Tower" renamed to wind, and maybe do some more crappy programmer art for it.

Speaking of programmer art, I'll have something pretty cool to show you guys in a few days that ISN'T programmer art. Look forward to it. I'm very excited.

 

[GM_Silver]

More progress!

Unfortunately, the progress isn't nearly as visible as normal. Most of it was backend work, setting things up for when I go into content mode and just add iterations of things. I had to rip code out of the basic tower and modularize it so I can make the different elements of tower, for instance. I also had to clean up the code for projectiles (adding support for projectile angles as well), create a VFX manager object, start structuring out the data saving system, and decide on the SDF Commander's stats.

For the record, here are her stats with notes on what they do/will do:

Why yes, I *AM* gonna make you upgrade yourself to take that massive minotaur!

As for the visible part that I can turn into a gif... Since I did all that work to allow me to make differentiated towers, here's the Wind Tower, shooting Wind Bullets.

Behold, the gif!


Finally, here's a sneak peek at the cool thing I mentioned the other day:


Next up? I think I'll program the Ice, Fire, and Earth Towers, complete with crappy programmer art (and some from itch.io asset packs). We're rapidly approaching the point where the systems are complete and I need art to bring the project together.

 

[GM_Silver]

I'm sure you're surprised to hear that I've made...........

more progress.

Today a couple of things happened. One, I got some WIP sprites from the ARTIST I'm COMMISSIONING!!!! That's right, babey, we've got actual custom art coming this project's way. As you can obviously see in the gif, I'm just using placeholder sketches that the artist so kindly provided. Once she's got all her colors and pixels, the Commander is gonna be gorgeous.
Now the attack animation isn't the world's stupidest-looking sword rotating awkwardly!

Other than getting those WIP sprites and making the necessary change to integrate them, I also made a "stunned" status for enemies so I can implement mechanics to stop them temporarily, made AoE projectiles, and combined the two into Ice Towers! As you can see, they deal their damage in an area around impact, temporarily freezing/stunning the enemies it damages.

So yeah, behold the gif!


Next up are the fire and earth towers! I'm probably also going to build a more elegant "status" system that'll give every enemy a list of statuses that they process each frame. It'd be cool to implement a "burning" status, for instance!

 

[GM_Silver]

Progress is pretty eclectic today. For one thing, I've completed the BASIC functionality for both Fire and Earth Towers (only earth pictured below, sorry I forgor). I've also gotten upgrade trees completed in their most basic form for the Wind and Ice towers. Then, I've been working on replacing the ugly system messages with nicer transitions.

Behold, the gifs!




Still haven't gotten around to statuses yet, but that's okay because that's not part of the "MVP" scope.
Unfortunately for me, I'm gonna have to descend the bloody steps to GUI Hell again. Gotta make a main menu and get some other common video game scaffolding around this game.

But the fact that I'm about to work on a main menu means one very important thing: there are no more game systems to build for the MVP version. It's all content and polish from here: more enemies, more art, more refinement for existing systems. I think I'll be about ready to start distributing playtest copies once the following requirements are met:

• Main Menu is functional
• The first two enemies are animated (not the sex)
• The Commander's non-sex animations are complete
• The towers have better sprites, animation optional

Anyway, that's all for this post. The next few posts might be less exciting because there won't be as much "new" stuff to see. Thanks for reading this far, and hope to see you in the next one!

 

[GM_Silver]

Some progress, even if it isn't super exciting. I suspect that the majority of gamedev is actually not exciting for the average player, and this update is some of that. But hey, you're reading this, so you can't be the average player, can you?

Basically we're getting that "video game scaffolding" I mentioned the other day. Some basic transition sequences, the world's most basic menu. Oh, and we've got some placeholder music in there from a pack I got on HumbleBundle a couple years back. You obviously can't hear it, but the main menu is capable of changing the volume, so that's nice.

Behold the gif.


So yeah, not exactly titillating, is it?

Ah well. Can't be a game dev if I only program the fun parts haha...