Well, I’m not super happy with this, but it’s an improvement. All the information I want to display is here now:

The player ship’s just picked up a weapon powerup, levelling their gun to level 2, hence the little text flash over it. The game feels a bit more cluttered but way more accessible. I won’t have to explain heat and powerups in a lengthy tutorial now, so I think that’s a fair tradeoff!

I’m filling out all the odd corners of the game. It’s feeling much more complete now, though without bosses, menus, challenge modes or anything it’s still miles away from release. Still… it’s slowly getting there.

I have been fighting the twin evils of SINUSITIS and also CAR WEEING PETROL ON THE DRIVEWAY. Even so, I have found time to craft this:

When you fire the game up now it gently walks you through a 30-second tutorial explaining side swapping, suicide, and the timer. Then it instantly dumps you into the game proper where you will die horribly.

I reckon this is a much friendlier introduction to the game than skipping straight to the horrible-death part.

Fight Back has been monochrome for weeks. I got bored of this! MAKEOVER TIME.

OK, the backgrounds are still crappy and the UI is rubbish and incomplete, but the game’s way more visually attractive now and it’s much easier to see what’s going on. Result!

Here’s the concept mockup I did for the colour version, which shows the same scene with colours vs. black & white:

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I’m finally getting back to work after a long week off!

I’m working on Fight Back’s tutorial system. There’ll be a short tutorial to teach you about side switching, lives and the timer. It’ll work by communicating useful information to you through floating text panels while you’re playing.

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.

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I’ll be honest: I haven’t got much done since Monday.

What I have got done isn’t very visible, either! I’ve been messing around with game balance and testing some major rules changes. Mostly, I tried making time less important, but it turned out that’s where a lot of the excitement comes from, so I’m making it more important and more visible. I’m also trying to figure out how to redesign the UI to make a bunch of things clearer (like your weapons overheating, and what the hell’s actually going on!).

So what’s next for the rest of this week?

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I’ve been having trouble with my work ethic, so last week I committed myself to doing 40 hours of proper work, no matter what. The idea was, everyone does a 40 hour week as normal, right? So it should be easy – the bare minimum. Shame on me if I can’t do it.

Given my tendency to muck about, this meant I ended up working pretty much solidly through the evenings of Monday-Friday, but I did it! And that 40 hours work led to a pretty solid start on my new game. There’s a new playable version beneath the jump.

Give it some time to load. It’s about a megabyte, and I haven’t written a preloader yet. You’ll hear the music when it starts 🙂

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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.

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is terrible.

But it still technically sort of works, so I made a video! Here’s what I’ve done since Monday:

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I set myself a goal for this week: I’d spend 40 hours actually working, no matter what! I’ve managed 8 hours on day 1, so I think I’m on target. 😀 And what have I been working on?

FIGHT BACK

Super early version below the jump, since it’s quite CPU intensive.
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