Spent Wednesday hanging out with Hanzonaut, talking concepts, getting drunk, playing Test Drive Unlimited 2. Good times. So this update’s a day late and a bit light.
Random good news – Vigilance won Bytejacker’s Free Indie Rapid Fire this week! It was a shootout between three Ludum Dare games and my game was selected and took it home with 65% of the votes. Pretty awesome! More incentive to spend next week polishing this game up and find it a permanent home on the internet.
Back to FIGHT BACK! I haven’t implemented anything for the new stages yet but I’ve spent the time brainstorming and I have pretty solid concepts in mind now. Sector 2 will be about homing attacks, suicide ships, and giant frickin’ lasers. Sector 3 will be about EPIC THINGS IN SPACE, like asteroid fields, warpgates, floating weapons platforms with turrets on, and battleships which span multiple waves. Sector 4 will be about… well, I’m not sure yet, but I want to work in ships that arrive on screen in a chrysalis that takes 5-10 seconds to ‘hatch’. I might work in semi-organic ships at some point. The concept for sector 4 is just to mash everything so far together with a few new boss ships. That might not be enough… but we’ll see.
Pickup-wise, I’m planning to add a homing missiles pickup in sector 2 and an aimable turret in sector 3 which you’ll be able to fire around at random angles. I think that ought to be a decent mix.