Spanner in the Works

[Arowx]

Hi there I had a go at making a 7DRL called Spanner, in Unity but it well suffered from feature creep in a big way e.g. it's 3D.

Spanner was just going to be Dwarves in Space, but I had a few bits of code lying around so it grew and grew.

E.g. at the end of the 7 days my todo list still has 80 items that need working on.

OK I should provide a quick overview of what I have so far:

The game is made up of three sections at the moment (did I mention feature creep) none of which are complete yet.

1. You build your own ship in amazing 3D.



2. You fly your ship around the asteroid belt - in theory to fight enemy ships and visit asteroids.



3. You can exit your ship at an asteroid where you enter a 3D roguelike setting with enemies and loot.





I have been listening to rougelike radio and believe the roguelike community could be interested in a very rough but almost playable version of this game?

So should I try and get a very rough alpha version working to get your feedback and try and motivate me to work on the game further?

Spanner Alpha 0.01

[getter77]

You should definitely go for it---feature creep is not to be feared so long as you leave a publicly enjoyable mass of creep corpses trailing behind as you press onward into the horde.

[Arowx]

It's underway, I'm just going for a minimally playable experience, and then put the alpha up for feedback.

So far, you can build a basic ship, launch it (after checking the pre-flight checklist) fly about and attack the enemy ship.

Next up docking with an asteroid and pop out for a spacewalk, rouguelike 3D style, and the creeps are Zomorks!

[Eben]

Put it out there!

As long as we know that it's Alpha we'll be receptive

[Arowx]

Very early alpha version now online, please try it and see what you think of the concept?

Spanner Alpha 0.01

So far you can only:

Build a basic ship.
Fly it into the asteroid belt.
Fight the enemy ship.
Visit an asteroid to fight the Zomorks.

NB: Requires Unity Webplayer

Any and all feedback welcome.

[ekolis]

It crashed the Unity Web Player as soon as it was done loading

[Anvilfolk]

Looked interesting!

Making a ship as a ton of potential, but somehow the way the builder works is pretty counter-intuitive I was expecting it to be 2d, but it started piling tiles upon tiles, so despite my best efforts I got a little frustrated and made a blob ship by wiggling my mouse around a little with every component

It starts piling up tiles on top of one another, and right-clicking (to remove the tile) actually opens a right-click menu, so it makes it really hard to remove tiles that were placed by mistake

It's definitely up to a great start, and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes from here

[Arowx]

It crashed the Unity Web Player as soon as it was done loading

That's odd as the very first screen is just the game title, with a play button?

OK make sure you have the latest version of the webplayer which you can get here.

Also try refreshing the web page as it could be a download hiccup.

Looked interesting!

Making a ship as a ton of potential, but somehow the way the builder works is pretty counter-intuitive I was expecting it to be 2d, but it started piling tiles upon tiles, so despite my best efforts I got a little frustrated and made a blob ship by wiggling my mouse around a little with every component

It starts piling up tiles on top of one another, and right-clicking (to remove the tile) actually opens a right-click menu, so it makes it really hard to remove tiles that were placed by mistake

It's definitely up to a great start, and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes from here

Glad it worked, you can also delete with the Delete key, or select full screen from the menu.

The tiles default to the green plane or next to an existing block when you point at one of it's sides.

I use the middle mouse button to let you spin around the view and scroll wheel to zoom in/out.

But there is a lot of room for improvement in the ship building process.

Thank you for giving it a go any and all critical feedback welcome, I'm new to the roguelike genre so all suggestions welcome.

[Arowx]

@Anvilfolk Found the bug that was frustrating you in the ship builder, the default build material was set up wrong, fixed it cheers. 

Also added in a selection cube, this shows up as a transparent green cube showing you where your next block will be positioned. 

Same link as before Spanner Alpha 0.01

[ekolis]

It crashed the Unity Web Player as soon as it was done loading

That's odd as the very first screen is just the game title, with a play button?

OK make sure you have the latest version of the webplayer which you can get here.

Thanks! It actually tried to auto-update when I loaded it the first time, but the auto-updater failed for some reason. The manual update fixed it though.

[Arowx]

Great, any and all feedback welcome!

I'm working on the editor, as I want to make a Millenium Falcon, just as a test  , but the existing tool set is limited.



I think I need to make the default grid bigger and I need to add a way to clone the hull shape and duplicate it.

What spacecraft would you like to build with your Spanner?

What features would you like to see in the editor?

[Arowx]

New update same link, added a Zone or Region selection to the editor, it's just a way to select a region of the editor.

You can size the zone, move the region, copy, paste or clear the contents of the zone.

And you can mask a zone, which makes only elements within the zone visible.

Lots of new features so let me know how it goes and/or if you hit any bugs, please?

Hopefully these features should round out the basic editor and I can move onto improving the asteroid belt and asteroid exploration elements of the game.

[Arowx]

With the new editor features managed to easily build the hull of the Falcon.

I'm having fun at least, maybe I need to build the zomorks ships as tie fighters!

I know I'm supposed to be building a roguelike game but I'm having fun! 

[Arowx]

Just messing about but with Spanners basic voxel editor, making your characters ship, might just be the first step!

[ekolis]

I think a major problem with the ship designer is that you can't see the inside of your ship without deleting whatever is covering it up.

Also, what is the role of hull bits? Does everything need to be attached to a hull in order to function? (That is, the hull serves as a skeleton for the ship.) Or is the hull supposed to coat the exterior of the ship like armor?