Hello everyone! I want to provide you all with some updates as to what’s going on the last couple weeks. The main feature I added to the game lately is a powerup called the Wavinator. Players can knock back boats and other obstacles by making waves! Tonight I will be working on adding a couple more items to make the game more fun to play as well. Last night I stayed up all night to try to fix a bug with the physics system "removing" colliders when gold crates are created. Come to find out the bug was three lines that I forgot to remove while debugging. I guess that’s the programmer’s life, haha. The first internal demo is almost complete, I hope to deploy it to some friends and get some early feedback. I’m hoping to be able to afford purchasing a new iPad Pro later this year if a new one is released for debugging and testing purposes. Not owning an iOS device is the only setback at this point from not releasing once the game is ready. My high school open house is this Sunday and I’m planning on having a couple ThinkPads set up for people to play the internal demo of Steer Clear. In theory I should be able to receive some valuable feedback to improve the early builds. Next week I’ll provide another update on the feedback I’ve acted on and some new content I’ve added.

Hello everyone! Yesterday I have been working on adding controller support to the game. I’ve been testing with both an Xbox 360 and a SNES clone USB controller. Hopefully by covering compatibility with both controllers, that should add support for a wide variety of them. The game is playable with both a D-Pad and/or axis on the controller.

This week I have been working on finishing the final boss (you may see cough phase one cough in the trailer coming soon…) The final boss is totally awesome, it will definitely bring a plot twist to be sure. That’s not the focus for this post though, today I want to talk about some new items that I have implemented.

It’s been over a month since I wrote my last devlog! A lot has been added and changed in Steer Clear during the last month. The first change that you would encounter when playing the game would be the new main menu.

Hello everyone! The last few days I have been working on transitioning my game over to Phaser 3. While the preview may not look like much, I created some basic and boring placeholder sprites so I can nail down the main mechanics as best I can. Through the use of placeholder graphics, I think I have been able to accelerate the development time of the port and still be able to release on time within a few weeks.

Hello everyone! I have worked on one (possibly?) neat feature today: bridges. Occasionally, the player will have to move underneath bridges and avoid the caissons holding them up! It may get tricky when there are some freighters and steamships passing under the bridge at the same time so it’s important to stay aware. Currently there’s only one type of bridge, one for cars and trucks with sidewalks on both sides. Tomorrow I want to add cars and trucks that move across the bridge in both lanes on the bridge. I’m thinking about adding railroad bridges as well though, which may add some variety. Anything that will make the game more interesting, fun, and exciting I want to add and I think bridges are a great step in the process.

Hello! Today I’ve came up with an idea because I want to make the game a bit more interesting and also add a purpose to earning gold. The idea I came up with is shop boats. These are boats where your tugboat is able to pull up alongside and buy powerups and other items with the gold you collected. Since I’m using the Phaser game framework (I highly recommend it by the way, you can find it here), I’ve been messing around with faking the illusion of how all the boats move when your boat stops, because it doesn’t make a ton of sense for boats to come at you while buying items next to a shop boat.

Hello everyone, my name is Jared York and this is the start to a series of devlogs leading up to the release of my game Steer Clear. Steer Clear is a game where players navigate a tugboat and barge through narrow ports and increasingly complex waters. Players can pick-up deliveries in the water and drop them off at specific docks that are requested during pick-up. In exchange for dropping deliveries off at docks, players earn gold which is used essentially as a score.