First lets start off with the only glamorous thing I worked on the last couple of days.
One glamorous thing, that I need your help with
Left is current, right will be new
I have been told by a few play testers that my explosions don't look like explosions. So my attempt at rectifying that I think have kind of failed. So it's actually a gameplay mechanic. You cannot navigate through an explosion or the part of your ship that enters the explosion with be damaged. This will hopefully allow for some interesting situations with enemy fighters. Imagine an enemy fighter that follows your movements, you can use that to you advantage and boost your shields maneuver them towards other fighters and when there's an explosion take them all out at once.
This sort of mechanic will hopefully make more interesting decisions and situations during game play. I have tried a few different colors with the exploding blocks but I feel that it is not exactly what I am looking for. So I will need to experiment with different effects to see which ones will work better.
Less than glamorous parts
Game development and programming in general usually are products of your own making. You have a clean slate when you start out. Where you choose to put things and how you choose to structure things inevitably lead to whatever thing you have to change. So nobodies perfect and since you do not know exactly how your game will be when you start out there really is no way to plan where things need to go before you have a place for them.
So, I cleaned up a bunch of stuff:
- Removed scoring, as it has no purpose, will be replaced by stats
- Add saving ship plans between game launches, this adds to the meaning of the game
- Make sure the player can go to the bottom of the screen
- Fix the gamepad support, needed to add a way of selecting missions on planet
At this point I feel its a little more important to work on some of the core loop of the game and adding more content to at least make it interesting to play. In this regard I think saving the ships and adding cost to the parts are the best first step I've made.
I think if I can fix up issues with the 'Hyper Jump' between planets that will also help improve the meaning of the game. Which should be added to the list above but it was not working as well as I would have liked.
Keeping punishment small
I believe in keeping punishment and negative effects to a minimum in my game design. I do want things to feel hard but I do not want things to feel unfair. I want them to be challenging with lots of interesting decisions but be extremely rewarding to the player. So if I give you a really good weapon, I want you to enjoy using it so I'll just increase how many times you need to use it, that will increase the likelihood of you getting killed or damaged or incurring punishment. It's important to keep those punishments from halting a players progress in the game. While still making the game enjoyable.
So I plan to add the necessity to repair your ship if it gets damaged after a mission. This will involve an additional cost. I am thinking of diverging the requirements between devices though which might be hard to maintain. But on mobile there will be a time penalty where the repairs will take a bit less cost wise but with the addition of a time penalty. Cost adding up with each additional part that needs to be recreated. The desktop version will probably have no time penalty but cost a little bit more.
Now that I've thought about the idea, it occurs to me that I could probably have the time penalty on all versions and just add a instant repair option with the additional cost. Since there isn't much more to do in the game that would justify switching to while your ship was being repaired except may be ship building. But if you don't have the resources or don't exactly want to design another ship then it doesn't make much sense.
Download the game now
It's available on all major platforms, currently
Thanks for following, if you have any suggestions or ideas about cool things that would make the game so much better please leave them in the comments.
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