This week’s been crazily productive! I’ve actually just about hit that 40 hour target, which is mental, since I haven’t been counting all the time faffing on the Internet and dithering.
Back on Wednesday, I’d finished creating a rough experience that was fun for a few seconds but rapidly got old. Since then I’ve been setting up the longer-term things that will keep the game fresh.
I’m building the game up using what I’ve heard described as the ‘cycles within cycles’ concept. It’s what you get when there are multiple layers to the game, with larger cycles driven by the smaller cycles repeating inside them, and the smaller cycles given new context by progress through the larger cycles. In the case of Fight Back you’ll dash forwards and back repeatedly to kill enemy ships, you’ll kill enemy ships to clear waves, you’ll clear waves to reach bosses, you’ll defeat bosses to progress the game, you’ll play through the game repeatedly to unlock new stuff, and so on.
As you can see, I’ve now got a second ship type, support for multiple ships per side and some UI elements. Those are ‘score’, ‘time remaining’ and ‘lives’ respectively.
Fight Back is going to be a race against the clock, fighting through multiple waves of increasingly tough enemies, with the occasional boss. I think time attacks are a lovely mechanism. If you do well in one round the remaining time immediately carries over to the next, so there’s constant pressure to do your best.
How you actually get time is tied into the game’s gimmick, and I’m going to stay vague about that until I’m closer to release. Sorry 🙂
Next week I’m going to work on adding more ship types, adding some pickups and developing the AI. Fight Back has more in common with fighters than typical shmups. You can control any ship in the game, so they all need to be near-equally good. Since they’re equally capable, the only way to tune the difficulty is to make the AI easier to beat in earlier levels and fiercer later on.
Then it’s on to the serious business of designing the waves in the game and setting up the difficulty curve.
