Today’s been a bit random. I spent a while this evening playing around in the Starcraft II map editor, trying to find a good way to reduce a better player’s economy to make for interesting matches against weaker players.
I’ve mostly been plugging away on expanding Fight Back, though! It now has a third fighter type and a sidepod system. Here’s the new blink fighter (white) with level 1 laser pods squaring off against a basic fighter (black) with level 2 laser pods. The blink fighter’s Cool Thing is that it can teleport as often as it likes, hopping back and forth across the screen to issue scattered bursts of death.
The levelling pickups was just a bit of random R-Type inspiration. Whenever a ship collects a pickup, it gets level 1 sidepods. Collecting more pickups of the same type levels up the sidepods, to a maximum of level 3. Die and you drop a level 1 pickup. This dynamic feels pretty good to me – you can have a level 3 pickup, but you have to start over from level 1 every time you swap.
In ‘cycles within cycles’ terms, this gives you something to plan for and aim for spanning several waves at a time, even if those waves are individually identical. It shouldn’t break my ideal of symmetric battles, either – I can always give your enemies high level pickups, too. 😀
I’m still playing with the rules to see what sticks, but things are nailed down enough now that I can start thinking about a tutorial. This game definitely needs one… it’s a little counter-intuitive and very fast paced. With that in mind I spent a good chunk of this evening on a font sheet and text renderer, so the game will shortly have text bubbles to explain what’s what during a brief tutorial intro. Hopefully that’ll be clear enough.
Here’s to next week and a much more polished alpha!