The most consistent feedback I’ve had about Fight Back is that it’s hard to tell when you’re about to die. I avoided putting a health bar in for as long as possible, relying on smoke, visible damage and the general ‘feel’ of having taken damage, but I’ve finally been experimenting with one today.

Here’s the first version I tried, with RTS-style health bars over everything.

Clutter city, am I right? And the health bars don’t really stand out, either.

Firstly, I realised there wasn’t much point to having health bars for all the ships; the important thing is knowing what your health is. Secondly, the appropriately-coloured health bars are bad. If the health bars have the same colour scheme as the ships instead of the UI, then they disappear into the scene.

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I’ve been somewhat distracted by Portal 2. It’s pretty awesome!

In development news: I’ve set up a potentially-final menu layout. It’ll look prettier before the game’s done, but the functionality is there.

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Check it out. Placeholder splash screen:

Amazing, right? Still, it stops the game from starting music immediately, which was bugging alpha testers.

More importantly, I’ve spent most of today totally redoing the tutorial. Fight Back is quite a mechanically complicated game, and it’s doubly cursed by being so fast-paced there’s no time to experiment with things. That means it needs quite an intrusive, structured tutorial to make as much sense as possible on the first run.

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The sucky thing about changing how all enemies and allies behave forever? Everything needs to be rebalanced. Between that and AI work I’ve got nothing really new to show today. Still, my AIs are believably stupid now and the difficulty curve’s starting to get back to fair.

Next week I’ll redo the tutorial and finally start work on that main menu business. It’s long overdue!

Until today, Fight Back’s AI ships were simple creatures. They operated by blindly pressing buttons at random. They weren’t easy to beat, sure, but they were stupid.

Now they are smart like fox. I’ve developed the new AI by building it to play the game against the old ones. It’s now better than I am. Here it is taking the current level 20 boss on, with some debug visualisation:

I’m using a sort of heat map approach – a combination of long term planning and short term reflex avoidance. Green squares are places it wants to be. Red squares are places it doesn’t. That’s how it gets around, lines up in a shooting position and dodges bullets.

The first step in writing an AI is making it perfect. This guy’s still a long way off, but it won’t be long! The second step is making it human – giving it human failings like reaction times and a longer decision loop, then teaching it to compensate for those with smarter, fuzzier decision-making. That’s the stuff I’ve got to get onto next, because if I use this AI for all the enemy ships right now the game is hell.

I’ve been playing with damage effects. I’ve also recoloured the bullets from the sidepods so what pickups do is much more apparent.

Sadly it’s still not that clear. I think I’ll play around with procedural effects for damage tomorrow, change the smoke trails that indicate damage and change the pickup icon in the bottom left. (No, it’s not a pause button!)

I think the experimental phase of Fight Back is done now and I have a fairly good grip on the core mechanics. That means it’s time to stop playing around and plot a course for the end of the project.

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