Progress and plans
Hello!
I’m gonna try something new and make some devlogs on my progress on the game. So sorry, no update yet. I’m taking my time with this one.
What I got so far
So the game revolves around the two weapon types: the damaging orange gun and beam, and the pink hypno-beam. The enemies will be either piloted or drones. The drones can only be destroyed by the orange weapons, but the piloted ones can be hypnotized with the hypno-beam, where they abandon their ship and self-destruct, causing an explosion which destroys everything in vicinity and bullet cancels. You collect the pilots, which work as currency. The enemy ships can also have a shield, which must be destroyed with the orange weapons.
I got a framework for different enemies and weapons working, but it needs some tweaking. And the level and spawning I got pretty passable and performant. I can get around 6000 bullets before the fps dies, but if 600 looks like this I think I’m in the clear performance wise.
Just dodge
The plan is to have a randomized mode and a longer level with the true last boss and ending. The randomized mode would have a short level made of segments of the longer level. You could choose the difficulty level and it would take different parts from the long level accordingly. Each random level would end in the boss, who you transform and capture. After the level you return to the mothership and the captured boss chooses how they wish to contribute: as a pilot, or producing fuel or bombs. All of the captured non-boss pilots are assigned randomly.
Choices
Pilot
Only choosing the pilot has a meaningful effect, you get a new ship. The rest just work as a representative how all of the captured transform. You get to see how they progress every time you return from a level.
The two ships work like this: The original ufo can carry 3 auto-bombs which work as lives, and if you run out, the ship returns to the mothership unharmed with all the captured pilots. The other ship has regular lives and can’t hypnotize, but can manual bomb, and has no limit how many bombs can be loaded.
The main goal is to beat the longer level, either with the ufo (1CC) or brute-forcing with an armada of the second ship.
For a next demo release I’ll probably make the random part of the game with place-holder level segments and first draft of the resource management.
Thanks for reading
Comments
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That hypno-beam weapon looks really cool! It really feels like a different weapon, from the looks of it, which is something that a lot of weapon variants struggle with in this sort of game, since there's not a lot you can do with just "shoot forward". I'm definitely looking forward to seeing the transformations once this gets updated.
Glad the beam looks interesting, pretty proud of it honesly hehe. It needs some tweaking, but I’m pretty confident it’ll end up fun to use. Got the art done for one of the transformations. I think I’ll show those in the next version and the other transformation in the full release. But still got a long way to go. I think I’ll downgrade and ditch the randomization for the next release and just try to get a complete level and first draft of the mothership working.
Thanks for reading and commenting!