Devlog

Yeah yeah I missed another devlog. Big whup. I spent the extra time adding more blood to GunWagon. Like a lot more blood. There is probably too much blood now, it's kind of ridiculous.

I also fixed bugs, lots of boring bugs that I'm not going to list here when what you want to hear about is the new zombie right? I can't show you the new art for it because, wait for it......... it's INVISIBLE!!!! Yup, when I added the bloody trails to the zombies I figures why not have a zombie that is just a bloody trail? So I did it.

Oh also free weekend! Download GunWagon for free until monday morning! It's free real estate!!!!!!!!!!

Yo dawgs! Here's another update to GunWagon, this one is mostly bug fixes, not enough for bullet points though. Finally fixed wagon spawning so they will be in the correct order. Fixed a bug where skill buttons wouldn't unlock. Fixed legacy loot from dead donkeys re-appearing. Fixed some issues with touch controls and sized up the virtual sticks. Added cute little footprints to the donkey.

There is still a bug with the gunroller. When you get a new gun you have to switch to a different gun slot and switch back before the gun abilities will activate.

GunWagon is quickly nearing full release status! I'm going to continue doing internal testing for a few more weeks but if no more bugs pop up GunWagon could go to version 1.0 very soon!

Hey. What has two thumbs and doesn't always remember to post updates? AATHISGUUUYYY!!!!

For real though, V0.60 had a bunch of bug fixes and most importantly I added a difficulty slider that will increase the speed at which zombies are spawned. The spawn speed already increases with each passing level so on the hard difficulty you will hit the "spawn rate cap" much sooner. I wish I could raise the cap but if I set it any higher the game will crash on older devices and we can't have that now.

So that was V0.60, pretty cool. You know what's cooler? V0.61 that's what! You see V0.61 is the first version exported to ANDROID OS! Woo Hoo!! Now that you are all excited I'll let you know that the android version is not ready for release, it is basically functional. I'd say I got 92% functionality on the first try, pretty proud of myself not gonna lie. The leftover tweaks should be done in the next few weeks along with some buffer time for testing I'd say android should be supported within a month if all goes well.

Also there's a linux version on itch.io that is completely untested, I have not taken the time to set up a linux environment or anything. Someone asked for linux, so I exported for linux, if you have problems on linux please post them in the forums on itch.io.

Well I finally made it! I'm releasing the first beta version of GunWagon to the world! You can head over to The GunWagon Itch.io page and get it right now! Then when it crashes or otherwise freaks out head back to that same page to leave feedback in the forums! Yay beta!

I'm just rolling dice to see how many points I add to the version number. Controller support is implemented! I did a playthrough the other day with an xbox controller and had no major issues. I was worried that aiming with the analog stick would be too difficult but it doesn't seem to be much of an issue, maybe a little bit with the sniper rifle/bolt action guns but sniping is supposed to be hard right?

I did another rebalance of the general economy, guns cost more, doubled the cost of the gun upgrader wagon, raised the cost of loot boxes on the market and some other small tweaks. I also locked some of the skills as another gold sink. I could have just lowered rewards but I feel like causing the player to make more choices will add more variety to each run. Instead of being able to unlock everything every run you might have a run where your donkey is super buff, or one where you forget the donkey all together and just make your character super-human (max out the movement buffs and zip around like a ninja!).

Fixed the grenade throwing mechanic, again.....

I did some fixing to the bosses, they were big damage sponges which was great but they weren't very scary. Two of them got buffs to bullet velocity and move speed so you should take more hits and have to dodge more. The other boss got a new particle effect that obscures it's bullets making them harder to dodge. I also shrunk them down a little, they were getting stuck on some maps.

The zombie spawn rate now scales with the map level, you shouldn't see a major difference in 25 round mode, after that I'm not really sure, I haven't tested it yet. If I did my math right (not likely) by level 50ish there should be a steady stream of zombies spawning in. All these changes still need a lot of testing which is a silky smooth way to lead into the next big news.

I will be releasing GunWagon first on Itch.io as a beta! I am working on the super-epic release trailer right now. I already have an intense voiceover that I snagged off fiverr and some footage cut together. I just need to work on some heavy thumpy loud music to go over it and once the trailer is done I'll have a release date. Head over to the Contact Page to follow GunWagon on Twitter and Reddit and be the first to play!

Happy new year to all and welcome back to the gunlog, your holiday destination for all things gunly and wagonish! It's been a busy month since the last post, I've been squashing a lot of bugs, untangling some spaghetti and after all that I had some time to code. *ba dum tissss* I fixed a bunch of visual issues, cleaned up the interface a little more, did some balancing and just started working on gamepad support. So far the player controls and most of the menus are functioning properly. The only issue is the lack of a built-in virtual keyboard and there is no trick I can find to use the windows virtual keyboard. So my options are to go with "partial controller support" leaving gamepad players no way to type in their name or cheat codes, or build my own on-screen keyboard from scratch, or do away with text input entirely, randomly generate the player name with one button and have unlocking the cheats be a button combo al la contra. BrB making a list of funny names to randomly generate...

Edit: Ok so we can have the best of both worlds, a random name generator for those without keyboards, AND button combos to unlock the cheats while still leaving the text boxes for peeps with keys!

I like big buttons and I can not lie! That's right I've been working on the graphical user interface AKA the GUI AKA "the gooey", I call it the gooey because the one I made was a hot mess. So I've been cleaning it up, I think I got it to "luke-warm mess" levels, you can check it out on the new media page above. There is now a consolidated theme for most of the buttons labels and other UI elements, no more random sized fonts. I kinda liked the randomness of the interface, I thought it gave the game some charm, but the new one looks all suit and tie professional big boy business time!

In addition to the interface I got side tracked with some other fixes.

• Reduced blood splats, they were annoyingly large.

• Started working on making the loot drops explode out of zombies instead of landing in a stack, almost got it.

• Loot makes a sound on pickup.

• Added more gunshot sounds.

• Explosions look more explodey.

I also had time to do some testing and found a handful of bugs/exploits that need to be fixed along with double checking all 100 maps, so it might be a minute before the next update.

Beta Baby! I'm calling it! Jumping straight to version 0.5! All maps are complete! That's 100 hand drawn, free-range, organic maps, also gluten-free! (Some zombies may contain gluten, don't eat the zombies). I also added some particle effects, blowing clouds for the tundra, tumbleweeds for the desert, dead leaves in the forest and some badly drawn bats for the mines.

Now that content creation is basically done I can focus on squashing bugs and adding polish. I have about two pages worth of fixes to make but very few of them actually affect the gameplay. Which means I can get another test build put together soon. I'm thinking of uploading to itch.io because they have a great system for setting up a closed beta. I definitely want to polish a bit more before I do any sort of public release, so if you want to be one of the first to test out GunWagon stay tuned and keep checking this blog for updates!

Hey folks! First of all I want to give a shoutout to all the workers behind the scenes at developers of all sizes. All the mappers, modelers, artists, sound engineers, testers, I'm sure I am forgetting a bunch of people, you know who you are! I just want to thank all of you for all your hard work throughout the years. I've been making maps for my game for the past month and I have to say, your job can be boring as heck! I mean how many different maps can you even come up with? I've gotten so bored I'm just writing notes with the map tiles and drawing little pictures. Did a whole set of dinosaurs, do you know how many dinosaurs you can draw from memory? I do. The stegosaurus map does look kinda fun tbh.

So that's why no version update. Good news though I'm 77% done with the mapping, this last 23% is going to get weird.

Hello again! This is a decent sized update which calls for one of my least favorite things... BULLET POINTS!!!

• Death stats now has stats.

• High score banner on main menu.

• Another new cheat code.

• Animated bosses.

• Upped XP gain again.

• Now buying wagons costs 50 wood each to give wood a purpose.

• Most scenes have background "graphics" now.

• Nerfed bosses.

• Mostly fixed the grenade, still needs some tweaking.

• Fixed various UI issues.

• Fixed a bug that allowed the player to skip levels.

• Buffed special abilities.

• Buffed them some more.

• Fixed various save/load issues and added a config file to save settings.

• Added choice of round limit on character creation screen. Complete all levels in 25 round mode to see the end scene, or go unlimited to see how long you can survive.

• Added an ending.

There are still a handful of known issues I need to fix, then I can get back to level creation. After a little more sound design and some polish I think this puppy will be ready to run. Release still TBD. Also check out new alpha footage HERE.

Hello again! Another action-packed update is ready for updating! List-style!

Fixes:

• Gun Roller now rolls new guns.

• Gun Rolled guns can now be sold.

• Missing buttons added.

• Loot pickup radius increased.

• Zombies now properly assign damage.

• Feral zombies now spawn on the map.

• Quitting on level 1 now kills you so your save file won't be corrupted.

• Rearranged info on menus for clarity.

• Fixed an exploit that gave extra loot boxes.

Additions and Changes:

• Added a new cheat code.

• Your health bar now bleeds when you are below 50%.

• Added cross-hairs with size matching the spread of the currently equipped gun.

• Added a bunch of red dots to the cross-hairs to match the gun types because feature-creep never ends.

• Loot used to pulse, now it spins.

• Added loot box opening animation.

• Gun Roller now levels up the rolled gun.

• Player's max health now scales with player level.

• Zombies give more XP.

Whew, made it to version 0.1! How did I do it you ask? Well I'm the guy who makes up the version numbers, so like, who are you gonna complain to? Anyways on to the highlights, not a whole lot of major changes, just THREE NEW BOSS ZOMBIES!!1!!!!!1! I'm not even going to spoil them here besides to say they are big ole' damage sponges that go well with the new bullet impact sounds.

To help guide your bullets to those new impact sounds (dang I am good at transitions), I've added a crosshair instead of the mouse pointer with different red dot patterns for the various guns. The size of the crosshair will also show you the spread of the currently equipped gun.

There is a bloody new indicator to show when your health is getting low. I also found some new bugs with different zombies ignoring donkey armor but other than that the game seems to be fully functional! I will be moving on to quality of life upgrades, adding more animations and finishing all the maps.

Hey again. Not a lot to report today. I fixed a bunch of bugs and re-implemented more stuff that was temporarily disabled. As far as I can tell almost everything is working as intended and the game is fully playable. There currently is no ending so with each level everything ramps up into infinity, or I guess the upper limit of an integer. Besides bug hunting I took some time to update the media on the main page with a fresh video and some screenshots. I also put together an itch.io page in preparation for launch. It might be happening soon if I can just stop myself from adding more features and finish the damn maps...

I'm back baby! Not a lot of progress on maps, but I've added some more polish and QOL-type changes. Here goes!

• More Blood! Splatters on bullet impact.

• Even more blood! Screen jelly when you take damage.

• Loading and saving. Save whaaaaaat?

• Character creation! Still in testing.

• Changed skill tree to reflect removal of the ammo mechanic.

• Pretty sure I finally fixed the shotgun bug....

• Permadeath. The current character's save slot is deleted upon death.

• Death stats screen. Currently contains no stats.

• Added a little more razzle-dazzle to the user interface.

• More fire! Destructible objects on the map can burn now.

I have a new synthesizer arriving soon. So I might take another short break from coding to play with my new toy. Hopefully it makes some cool sounds that will make their way into GunWagon!

What is poppin? Just a quick update, I've been cracking away at map making. Out of my goal of 100 maps I'm up to 29. Took a short break from mapping to do some playtesting and fixed a couple bugs. The shotgun was having issues but I fixed them. Now it's having different issues but at least they aren't causing a crash. I whipped up a quick and dirty loading screen because some scenes were unresponsive for a couple seconds after initializing. I'm not sure how but the loading screen flashes past in like 4 frames and the scene loads without the unresponsiveness issues. I'm considering artificially slowing down some load screens so I can add tips and lore.

For the next stretch I'm going to split my time between finishing maps and fixing bugs/adding features. I'm thinking about scrapping the characters and just letting the player choose their avatar/starting weapon/ability/etc. Also thinking about changing the skills to an unlockable tree or maybe a point/purchase system tied to each created character.

EDIT: Oh I forgot to mention, random gen maps aren't happening. There is too much re-work needed to implement it because it wasn't part of my original plan. The lesson to take away from this is always have a plan and always stick to it.

I'm back mother-lovers!!! I took a couple weeks off to reset my brain and also just because I can. Now I'm back at it and I'm looking at this code like "What braindead son of a biscuit wrote this garbage?" So I did some re-writing, re-structuring, and some reflecting and I've made some improvements. I can reliably generate randomized maps of any size that will have a starting point, an ending point and a path between them. I created a new UI overlay for the new minimap and I'm leaving it blank until I re-design the UI. Oh yeah we have a minimap now!

Now for the bad news. With the larger maps we also got larger performance issues and larger bugs. The performance issues seem to be related to the built-in pathfinding in the Godot engine and collision detection. In the second screenshot below I've added lines showing the zombies paths. They never seem to want to path directly to their target, they always shoot off to the side first.

The issue with collision detection could be something funky with my code. So the player has to collide with the tiles on the map and that's it, everything else collides with the player. Simple right? The zombies don't need to collide with the tiles because if they do it messes up their pathing and they get stuck. So I had to manually add polygons to the map chunks to tell the zombies where to navigate without running into walls. Now the zombies keep ignoring my carefully drawn polygons and using the walls to find their paths, which causes them to predictably get stuck where they sit endlessly calling for new paths through the wall and sucking processing power.

Oh did you think the bad news was over? Ha! Silly you! I'm getting some random crash that doesn't show up in the debugger that maybe has something to do with the way I toggle values of objects in arrays which may or may not exist..... yay.....

I'm calling this one a half-version step because nothing actually was completed. No bug fixes, no new content, nada. You may be asking yourself "why the update then?". Great question! While I haven't hit any milestones I have made major progress on implementing procedurally generated levels!!! I used a maze algorithm I found on Kidscancode.org with a little tweaking so it would work with the map blocks I made. Oh yeah I made a bunch of map blocks in 15 different shapes with 4 variants of each. So like 60Bajillion blocks!.

Below you can see Block#9 in all it's different forms and a snippet of console output I captured when the dang thing finally worked.

This version I added some new features and tweaked some stuff, here goes!

Added:

• New special abilities for each playable character! Orlando has a watch that slows down all zombies. Andre shoots a ring of fire out of.....somewhere burning nearby zombies. Kelly throws a stupid amount of grenades in all directions.

• Special ability charge meter, fills when you get combo kills.

• Gun Randomizer, a machine that will take the gun in your hands and replace it with a new gun of the same level with a randomized "type" and "rarity".

• Three new gun types "Minigun", "Blaster", and "Smart gun" that can only be found in the Gun Randomizer. The Minigun has a very high fire rate, the Blaster shoots exploding rounds, and the Smart gun shoots bullets that home in on the nearest target.

• Donkey armor, currently upgrades with donkey strength but I might give it a unique upgrade.

• Destructible objects that will block and confuse zombies until you destroy them.

Fixed:

• Softened lighting.

• Added missing gun level to GUI.

• Added missing shop buttons.

• Added pitch variation to some of the zombie sounds, makes it sound like they have different voices.

• Pause menu now works on all scenes.

Check out the images below to see the three new abilities, Gun Randomizer, and destructible objects.

Hello and welcome to the blog. This is where I'll be updating my progress on Gunwagon. Today was mostly about making adjustments but I did add a new feature as well.

• Changed: Zombie movement speed and pathing tick-rate. Zombies now follow the player more closely and match the player's starting speed making them more challenging, though you can still kite them around in circles endlessly as long as you watch your dash meter.

• Changed: Zombie damage function. Added armor check.

• Changed: "Maximum Zombies on the map" to 100 at a time with no major performance issues!

• Changed: Drop rates. Reduced ammo and added Health and Armor. Still needs more tuning.

• Added: Armor and Health drops. They look like gray/red hearts.

• Added: Armor bar under the health bar on UI.

Update: So I found a little extra time before the holiday break to squeeze in some more junk. I should probably start numbering things. Let's call that last one v0.01 and this will be the v0.02 update, yeah, that sounds like real developer talk. On to the update!

• Tweaked: All zombie movement speeds

• Fixed: When you reach the first town there is a much more prominent notification that you need to buy a new gun.

• Fixed: Carts now follow the donkey properly, though wonky starting positions make for a rough start. It's a funny harmless bug so it may stay.

• Fixed: Player walk animation wasn't always running. (get it?....running...heh)

• Fixed: Donkey was moving too fast.

• Fixed: Bug when pausing game during scene transition. Removed ability to pause during scene swap.

• Fixed: Some bug that was causing some script to run after the scene was blah blah nobody cares.

• Fixed: Mute button wasn't muting. Now it is.

• Added: XP bar now has glowy particles when you are 75% leveled!

• Added: Screen shake when taking damage to health (not armor because it absorbs the shake duh!).

• Added: Wagon that will let you level up the selected gun if you have enough scrap collected (WIP).

Hello again! Another "half-version" update because not much progress was made.

Well I've given up on randomly generated maps. It's a cool idea but the amount of processing power it takes to have giant maps with lots of zombies is going to cause problems down the road. The upside is I can have 100+ zombies on the "pre-made" map without a performance hit. I also went back to the old GUI without the mini-map. After testing I found it more distracting than useful and ultimately not worth the overhead. I made a map template that should help speed up the creation process, but it still took almost an hour to put together one map so if I don't post an update for a while it's probably because I'm playing cartographer.

I am also still experiencing a random crash with no error. I am not sure if it's software or hardware at this point so I will be splitting my time between trying to track that down and designing maps. In the next update I tell you how much caffeine can an 85Kg adult can safely consume per hour.