Made some good progress on the game this week including showing it to a few people at the Studio Time meetup here in NYC. Some of the notes I got there from other devs helped me to turn a bit of a corner design wise, the main one being to change the way the enemies are concentrated in the levels and have fewer, more dangerous clusters. This has solved a bunch of the problems I had earlier. The moral of the story: show people your game in person and listen! I’ve also signed up for a local demo night event where I’ll be able to get some players to play the game, more about that when it’s announced. The reasons for this are two fold: first to get me to finish a build that’s reasonably tight and playable and second to get feedback. I’m pretty excited about it.
I’ve also added three new weapons in the game for the player to get: big non-homing missiles that can explode the sky coral bricks (producing a very satisfying shower of flying debris), clusters of smaller short range rockets and falling mines that the player can drop on groups of enemies. All came together quite quickly last night which was fun and satisfying. Working on mechanics is so much more fun than trying to optimize frame rate or any of the other non-design ‘making working software’ aspects of development.
Here are some pictures of the new Twilight Ruins level:
