I wanted to thank all who helped me improve this game throughout the years. While making this game many people have been so helpful in giving me feedback and tips to improve the game. I started making Rocket Shipment from scratch to learn more about game engines. The physics and collision systems were one of the hardest things I had to program, but I powered through and eventually I'm really proud of what the game has become. Even though the game has not been a commercial success, I've loved making it and am forever grateful for everyone I met and everything I've learned in the process. The game has now been fully released! I will always keep updating to keep improving, but the main job is done, and that feels great! Thank you all once again for playing my funny little space game, and helping me along the road! Have fun Rocketeers!

A small update in preparation for the full release. Changes: - A new main level has been added - Fixed a bug where the game crashes on rebinding of certain controls

- Fixed a bug where the round crates got a wrong collider attached

- Added Steam achievements - Added reminder to save unsaved changes in the editor - Added gate pairing so touching gates of the same type will automatically share a detection range - Added 2 new levels - Optimized Wallblasters to only shoot when sufficiently close

- Introduced new crate shapes: "Long" and "Triangle" and added some levels introducing them - Removed showing level tips on a level restart - Added 'R' as level restart shortcut button - Increased rate of effect of the towing sensitivity setting, meaning it has a lower low and a higher high - Made level 26 a bit easier by making a few crates unbreakable - Slightly improved performance on bullet heavy levels Have fun!

- Fixed bug where level 24 was not playable due to cable being too short on initial grapple - Fixed bug where certain joystick controls were overwritten faulty on startup

- Added a new powerup: Dual cables - Added towing sensitivity option to accommodate players that find the pull physics a bit too difficult to handle - Upped the time until a forced death triggers when out of fuel - Added 2 more main levels

Hey rocketeers, Only a small update this time, but a cool one nonetheless. Powerups has been something on my list for a long time and I wanted to give them a try. This update features a very simple one: Life gain.
The added "life" powerup simply gives the player a life to a max of 5 total. It can help to overcome harder parts in levels for example. I do have other powerups in mind, but would like to try out this concept first. Alongside this feature I have also added 2 more main levels that use it. Have fun!

Hey rocketeers! Some more weeks have passed and again I've gotten some great feedback for some helpful features. Many new players find that the difficulty still ramps up pretty fast after the first 4 levels. To counter that, I've improved a couple of things to hopefully take that edge off a bit and ease players in more. First off, I have added 5 medium difficulty levels to give players a bit more practice before getting into the more challenging stuff. I've also added difficulty labels to levels. Main levels have a difficulty set, so you can easily choose your battles.
You can also set an estimated difficulty for your own custom levels.
When playing a level for the first time it might be annoying to have to look around for the locations of the crates. This is why I've added crate indicators, small arrows pointing to the undelivered crates in the level. In combination with the level panning functionality from the previous update you should be able to find all crates in no time.
When creating custom levels before completing the main ones there might be some components you have not seen before. This is why I've added tooltips that appear when hovering certain components in the catalogs.
Another big point of frustration was losing a level over accidentally destroying one of those pesky vulnerable crates. I decided losing the level might be a bit too harsh, and have replaced the gameover with a point penalty instead. A vulnerable crate damages in penalty steps of 100, up to a total of 300 per crate.
That's it for the new features. The complete changelog is attached below. I wish you all much fun and hope you'll let me know what you think! CHANGELOG v0.7.0: - Added crate indicators to point towards undelivered crates - Added tooltips to catalog items in editor for more clarity - Added level difficulty labels so it's easier to pick levels that match your skill - Added 5 new medium difficulty levels - Removed level 18 because it is simply too hard - Removed game-over by crate destruction - Added point penalty for damaging crates - Fixed bug where crash occurs when closing the game while a level hint is visible - Fixed bug where cursor keeps showing settings indicator after closing the editor

Hey rocketeers! Some more feedback has rolled in, and I noticed there were some improvements needed to accommodate inexperienced players better. With that in mind, I decided to pack this update with a couple of features dedicated to improving the player experience! I've added tutorial tips to 8 different levels. These will explain a range of things from steering and accelerating, to handling tanks. I plan to add more of these when finding a knowledge gap or when introducing new features.
Another big feature is the panning option in the pause menu. This option will provide the player with a way to explore levels without spending fuel. By pressing this option you will easily be able to pan the screen in the same way as the level editor does.
Furthermore it seemed not all players understand when the ship is invulnerable (after losing a life). To emphasize the invulnerable state, I've added a protection shield animation. Hopefully this will make it abundantly clear that the ship is safe while in this state.
Ship robustness has been increased a bit. Some find it hard to land the ship without losing a life, and others were frustrated losing a life on a small bump against a wall. While this is partly intended (Rocket Shipment is meant to be challenging), I don't want to induce rage quits in the first 3 levels already. I will keep focusing on finding more ways to further create an easier environment for new players just starting out. Currently I'm planning on adding a bunch of easier levels so the player can gain some feel and experience controlling the ship before trying more difficult levels. Finally, I've also done a graphical improvement for crates and flags. The crates and flags are now not only distinguishable by color, but also by shape. The center parts of the crates have been adjusted to contain different shapes, which are also used in their respective flags. This way I hope to make a first step towards making the game a bit more accessible to players that have trouble distinguishing the color marks.
That's it for now! Keep posted for future updates, and don't forget to share your creations! I always love to see new levels pop up in the Workshop! Have fun!

Hey rocketeers! After launch I wanted to make sure the first update doesn't only fix some bugs, but also contains some actual new content as well. I'm proud to announce the new update contains brand new conveyor tiles for you to expand your levels with.
I've added 2 new main levels to demonstrate some possible usages, but of course you are more than welcome to try out some of your own. Alongside this new addition, there are also a couple of other improvements that have been implemented. This is the full changelog: - Added all new conveyor tiles - Added 2 new main levels showcasing these new tiles - Added editable descriptions to custom levels - Added opaque color choice in ship editor - Added choice for wall blaster orientation when multiple are possible - Improved bullet animation - Fixed bug where certain screens in editor would not fade correctly when exiting the editor - Fixed bug where level with adjusted name would still have the same id as its last saved version - Fixed bug where some editor screens would not be focussed/navigatable when opened through mouseless navigation

Game development is such a weird field of work. Especially when doing it solo, you have to apply (or learn) so many different skillsets. Next to the programming there is art and music involved, marketing, planning, social media, architecture, game design, testing, community management, you name it. I embarked on a huge journey when starting to make this game in August 2018. My goal was to make something completely from scratch in a language I had not mastered yet. No usage of fancy existing game engines, just pure C++ code and a few libraries. Was it worth it? Definitely! Even though it will probably not be a huge financial success, I have learned so much that will help me with future projects and the support I got was amazing. Some of the key points I learned were: - Learn how, where and when to market (I actually wrote a small article about that here: https://chocolate-pinecone.medium.com/5-marketing-lessons-i-learned-releasing-my-first-commercial-indie-game-a2cfd1f82779) - Be open to harsh feedback, it's usually the most valuable - If you can, pay for things you are not skilled in or do not enjoy. It saves you time and results in better quality stuff than you could have made. - Take breaks when you need them, and remind yourself of your goals - Don't expect your first project to be financially successful. Instead expect it to be a stepping stone in the experience of game development. - Create the smallest acceptable version of your game first, and build out afterwards. I have pushed the release button this morning and loved it. I can't wait to see what happens, and what everyone will think of it! That's it for my little snippet of game development. If you do actually decide to play it, please consider leaving a Steam review. It helps insanely with getting more eyes on the game!

Rocket Shipment will be launching into Early Access on January 15 2021! With only a few weeks to go, I'm super excited to share the latest developments with you!
I've been pouring in everything I got these last months so you can hopefully enjoy Rocket Shipment even more. I want to keep improving the game with the feedback given after launch, so if you have ideas or other feedback please send it my way! Without further ado, here are some of the new features: New tiles:
Swappable background colors:
Brush sizes:
And a big one, a Steam Workshop Integration:
I can't wait to see some community content! If you haven't already, consider wishlisting Rocket Shipment! It really helps!

Finally some actual new content for the Early Access version! I've been blasting at it, getting as much done as possible before the release. The biggest challenge to date has been the new Blaster Drone. It's mean, it's lean and it's... dumb. For now at least. The first version will drive around randomly and shoot straight up, or aim at you if configured. After release, I'll expand on it, adding more intelligent AI. Here's a little preview:
It wasn't the easiest thing to create, but hey, gamedev is hard:

Also, locked gates are done! It's a pretty basic concept, but allows for some cool level concepts! We've got 3 flavours:
A couple of things are still in the pipeline, namely multiple ground types, a configurable background color and the Steam Workshop integration of course! Want to help me improve the game? Join the Discord!

Now that the demo has been out for a while I've been focussing on adding small features for both the demo and the full version. I've added stuff like: - A next level button after completing a main level - Small random pitch shifts on collision sounds to make them more authentic - A ghost preview of the selected object in the level editor Now I can finally focus on the full-version-only features and can really start on that big v1.0 for Early Access. The first feature I decided to pick up is extra settings for existing objects. I just finished a speed setting for gates which you can see here: Next on the list is a speed setting for the wallblaster! Other planned stuff soon after: - A moving enemy - New level settings like number of lives, fuel starting level and background color That's it for now! If you haven't tried the demo yet, please do! Want to help me improve the game? Join the Discord!

- Added ability to edit gates that are already placed in level editor - Added ghost preview of currently selected object in level editor - Added new collision sound for ship colliding with platform - Implemented escape button always working, even when exit functionality is remapped v0.3.2 Want to help me improve the game? Join the Discord!

Releasing the demo has been a great experience. Meeting new players and getting fresh feedback made me want to improve some things right away. This update introduces a couple of subtle changes to improve player experience. Enjoy! CHANGELOG v0.3.1: - Added "Next Level" button for after completing a main level - Added a small random pitch shift on collision sounds to make them sound more authentic - Added paint sound to ship customization - Tweaked max sound range to hear a bit more when things are further away - Reduced default music volume so it doesn't dominate as much - Fixed bug where steer control could activate too early after launch, causing a ship corner to hit the ground Want to help me improve the game? Join the Discord!

Roots Rocket Shipment has been in development for 2 years now. It started out as a personal challenge project to create an own game engine around a game. Now it has grown out to something I'd love to share with you all. What's in the demo? In the official demo you'll be able to experience 10 levels that introduce the basic mechanics of the game. You'll also be able to create your own levels in the level editor to up the challenge even more! Full version release I'm working hard to get the first Early Access version ready, and hope to release it in December. The full version will introduce a couple of things you won't see in this demo, like:

• Sharing levels in the Steam Workshop
• More enemy tech
• Different biomes and background colors
• More level components like Locked gates with keys

[previewyoutube=LeFong1Zoi4;full][/previewyoutube] Hello! My name is Jelmer Pijnappel, and I'm the sole developer of Rocket Shipment. I'm very proud and a little nervous to tell you the demo for my game is now available here, ready for download! Rocket Shipment is a tricky physics based rocketship delivery game with an integrated level editor. It's a fresh take on the old space classics like Lunar Lander, Crazy Gravity, Solar Jetman and Gravity Force to name a few. This game is long from done. I will keep on improving and expanding this game until the full release and beyond. Please feel free to try it out and tell me what you think. I'm always open for feedback!

It's is drawing near, and I can't wait! Polish, an extra level, new sounds, it's all coming together nicely in time for the Festival demo release. I've shown much already in the last post, but there is one major feature I doubted I could add in time. Nevertheless, I even finished it early! Which means I'll show it to you guys as well, of course! Here it is in all its glory:
SHIP CUSTOMIZATION! Redraw the ship to your liking and deliver crates like a boss! Next to this I did some balancing changes, and played through the whole demo myself. I'm very satisfied with the whole experience! New sounds are still in the making, but will be added in time for you to enjoy! Here's a little teaser already: https://youtu.be/YzQP-c8Dqns That's it, until next time! Want to help me improve the game? Join the Discord!

I'm thrilled to announce a Rocket Shipment demo will be publicly available in the Steam Game Festival! Roots Rocket Shipment has been in development for 2 years now. It started out as a personal challenge project to create an own game engine around a game. Now it has grown out to something I'd love to share with you all. What's in the demo? In the official demo you'll be able to experience 10 levels that introduce the basic mechanics of the game. You'll also be able to create your own levels in the level editor to up the challenge even more! Full version release I'm working hard to get the first Early Access version ready, and hope to release it in December. The full version will introduce a couple of things you won't see in this demo, like:

• Sharing levels in the Steam Workshop
• More enemy tech
• Different biomes and background colors
• More level components like Locked gates with keys

I'm so close! Only a few tasks left before the official demo can be released to the public. The biggest of these is a total revamp of the level editor. The previous editor layout took up way too much screen space with those big buttons and that huge catalog screen:
For the new design I chose a tighter layout by using icons for the buttons and putting them in a toolbar in the top of the screen. The catalog has been split in more catagories and slides these out when needed:
Neat, huh? Next to some under-the-hood improvements I also introduced cable elasticity. It causes carried things to have a bit less pull on your ship for more stability, but also makes precision work thougher because the elasticity jiggles the cargo faster. Of course I had to try some extreme elasticity values:
The elasticity setting will be set per level and can be chosen when making a custom one. That's it for now! Want to help me improve the game? Join the Discord!

These were not that hard to add. Spherical crates for that little extra variation. They pretty much speak for themselves: [previewyoutube=95E6PMayaGg;full][/previewyoutube] I also just finished a big performance enhancing feature. Before, the game loads all main levels completely on startup. When the player switches to the custom level view in the level selection menu, all complete custom levels would be fetched. This is a big waste of time and processing energy. Why load all levels completely when you're only going to choose 1? So I updated the system. Now all level files are first read partially, only getting the data needed to generate a small preview and stuff like the level name. Only when a player actually loads a specific level, will the system check if the rest of the data is still unknown. If so, only that specific level file will be read and processed. This practically eliminated any loading times I had and prepares the game for longer level lists. Score! Unfortunately my day job has picked up quite a bit, leaving me with less development time for Rocket Shipment. I still have the goal of releasing into Early Access this year, let's see how it goes. I keep a Trello board that roughly displays everything needed before releasing an official demo and eventually releasing in EA. You can find it here if you're interested: https://trello.com/b/CF3jQbjL/rocketshipment. My short term goal right now is releasing the demo to the public. It'll force me to finish the core demo and hopefully strengthen the community since I'm getting the feeling only 2 or 3 Discord members are still playing the game. Early Access still sounds a bit scary to me. I'm having a bit of trouble getting traction on social media, and am doubting I'll be able to make a big enough splash to get my game noticed in the sea of steam games. We'll see I guess. I'm trying not to make it a big deal because this is also meant as a learning experience. Want to help me improve the game? Join the Discord!

My available time to work on the game has decreased a lot. My full time job is taking up more focus and time now that I've been assigned to a new client. I'm happy I had just enough time to wrap up some loose ends and update the demo before this change happened. This update was the last one I had planned before starting on a new feature, gates! Gates are supposed to block certain directions and open up others. They can be used in various ways to make levels more interesting and complex. I can even make special types in a later update that need colored keys to open for even more interesting level designs. In essence they work pretty much the same as the gates in "Crazy Gravity", which you can see here:
Implementing these gates had a couple of challenges which I hadn't tackled before. This would be the first object that needed construction steps in the editor. All other objects basically only need a position to be placed, but gates need a length and an allowed direction to pass through as well. It took some time finding the right way to do this, but I'm very pleased with the results:
I chose to show images of possible passing directions instead of trying to explain it in text. I hope they're clear enough to understand. After I got gate construction, level saving/loading and previews to work, I plunged into getting the gate to detect when to open and close based on player position. After that I only needed to add the actual opening and closing movements and the necessary collider adjustments. All this I managed to pull off in a coupe of days, resulting in this functionality which makes me a very happy dev: [previewyoutube=XeP_tK2PGhk;full][/previewyoutube] Sure there's still sound missing and objects resting on moving gates are not pulled along yet, but hey the biggest chunk of work on this feature is complete and I'm feeling pretty awesome about it. That's my update for now, I hope you enjoyed it! Want to help me improve the game? Join the Discord!

Now that there's a small group of people playing my game I keep seeing more ways to make things clearer and smoother. From screen transitions and icon animations to little helping signals, there is a lot that can improve player experience. These are some of the things I've implemented in the last 2 weeks: - Spacey screen transitions between levels and the level selection menu:
- Landing signals on the white platform poles:
- Improved clarity of refuelling cable animation:
- Added turning indicator when reviving:
- Added animation when losing a life:
I'm almost done with v0.0.6, which has all these improvements. It will be available soon for the Discord members. Want to help me improve the game? Join the Discord!

I have had these points on my list for forever. Sliding menu screens, fading windows instead of hard visibility toggling, little popping animations when winning a level. I finally took some time and added them in the v0.0.5 pre-alpha demo update. I first started with the fading animation for windows, and set up a whole base for UI animations with it. This is the result!
The UI animation system worked pretty solid actually! While making further animations for popping stuff, I found some improvement points and expanded the animation system even more. Some popping success GUI elements:
Eventually I took on the beast of sliding complete menus, which actually almost felt like a breeze to make because of the now perfected animation system. Some sliding menus:
I'm noticing game is becoming more and more mature now that a lot of bigger bugs have been taken care of, and I'm polishing stuff left and right. The planning board is slowly showing bigger features more prominently while the flood of important bugs and improvements are done. I'm kind of intimidated by some features, knowing that they will take a lot of time and effort to round up and deliver. I want to keep updating the game regularly and am afraid these bigger tasks will slow down my updating spree. Still, I should also not push myself too hard. All in all this is (supposed to be) a thing I'm doing on the side, even though I've had tons of extra time in this COVID-19 chaos. One side of me tries to do work on the game as much as possible now that I have the time, while the other side of me tries to slow things down to avoid a dip when ACTUAL work starts again. Besides all these thoughts, I'm really thankful for the Discord community. They really help with development and seem to be having a good time. I honestly think they would not mind me slowing down when life picks up again. Want to help me improve the game? Join the Discord!

Progress on features is slow at the moment. I'm still pretty busy fixing bugs found by the Discord community, though the peak has passed. Now that things have calmed down I really wanted to update the trailer. The last one was really outdated and slow. I'm hoping this new one catches attention a bit more. [previewyoutube=YQlVyobAFbY;full][/previewyoutube] I finally took some time to do a little polish and chose to build an UI animation system. I started adding fades and focussing/unfocussing animations to windows, which you can see here:
I've also added a little popping animation on the icon of the level completion screen. Neat, right?
The demo is continuously being updated, so come check it out!

[previewyoutube=U5KxSz1WtUs;full][/previewyoutube] Oof, these weeks were hard! Apparently releasing stuff comes with a lot of annoying bugs, who could have known? One annoying bug I just could not solve at first. I spent a couple of days trying to track it down, until I finally was able to reproduce it. I discovered this bugger was only present in the Release build, which I cannot debug. Eventually I found out how to create a Release build that CAN be debugged, and solved it that way. All this took a lot of time, but hey, I learned something new! Now that things have calmed down I'm getting into the feature side of things again. I started off light with some polish here and there, like this wallblaster firing animation:
I also added some very basic levels and tweaked around some things for stability and to make the game feel better. All in all I'm very happy I made the decision to do a pre-alpha release. It's amazing to have such a positive little community dedicated to help with development this way! Want to join our little club? Here's the link! Hope to see you there!

TL;DR: Demo is available through the Discord Boy oh boy! I finally released something to the fans! Yes it's only a demo. Yes it's pretty basic. What do you expect from a PRE-alpha demo? But man, it feels good to get something out there. This pre-alpha demo is a small reward towards the discord followers that have been supporting me for so long. It's also a way for me to test my work on a small audience, iron out some bugs and detect what features are needed most while workind towards the full version. I'll continuously improve the demo until I have a demo version that is suitable for everyone (including a small tutorial, a "coming soon" screen, etc.) This final demo version will be published on the official itch, GameJolt and Steam pages. That's the plan. I hope it will work out. Here's some of the changes I've done while making the demo ready: - Build 5 official main levels to play - Add a little destruction animation for bullets:
- Adjusted resolution based zoom which could deform sprites a bit - Fixed some editor related bugs - Improved French and Japanese translations - Implemented sound volume adjustment based on distance from player - Implemented cursor hiding after a period of inactivity (only while playing levels) - Added more logging for easier bug fixing later on Join the Discord and come play! Share your levels while you're at it! See ya!

I've worked on an array of different things for the past 2 weeks. My last devlog showed some wall blasters. I've worked some more on these and improved the bullet sprite: [previewyoutube=S687qyqJmYY;full][/previewyoutube] A bigger change is the brand new addition of breakable crates:
Unbreakable crates have gotten a darker color and are, well, unbreakable:
Only a few slip ups and the breakable crates completely break, making you lose the level: [previewyoutube=965Gv0ng8Yw;full][/previewyoutube] Next to these new features, I've been wanting to update the ship sprite to be a little more complex. I made an array of possibilities:
But stuck with the first one. Here's how it looks in-game alongside with proof I'm playtesting too much:
That's it for now. See ya!

This took way longer than anticipated. I'm not finished yet, but the wall blasters are well underway. Wall blasters will periodically shoot a bullet in the direction they're facing. That's about it. It sounds simple, but shooting a bullet, bullet impact and integrating wall blasters in the editor really took a lot of time. The wall blaster paved the way for a lot of future stuff in different ways. For example, I didn't have any code that restricts placement in the editor. Wall blasters need to be mounted on a tile, which means they can't be placed in mid air. I now built a generic way of checking if a spot adheres to specific rules. Checking if a collision happened with a specific type of object (a bullet for example) was also not possible, so I also built a generic solution for that as well. I can't even remember all the other needed stuff, this all took too long. Here's how it looks now! Don't pay attention to the ugly bullet: [previewyoutube=Jsinjk4-oKI;full][/previewyoutube] As you may have noticed, I moved my devlog to here instead of the forums. I decided to do so because this is more visible to users. In case you want to see past posts, feel free to check out the link! See ya!