Say hello to 4C, at least the first prototype. In case you can't guess from the gif, 4C stands four colours. It's a simple shooter with a mechanic you've probably seen before, change colours to be able to damage specifically coloured enemy ships. Which at the moment have a shockingly stupid AI and just fly towards the ship constantly firing bullets (that's you!). As a prototype it's actually surprisingly fun, especially when the ships get close and panic ensues. If you're looking at the gif and thinking, "Damn that looks bland." you'd definitely be right though. Being a prototype lots of features are to be added of course! Here's the general order of what I'm going to add:
-Improved ship AI: The basic enemy ship will fly around the top of the screen and shoot bullets at you, get hit too much and BOOM, you ded son.
-Multiple enemy ships: I'm thinking three main types. The basic variety as mentioned above, a smaller variety that will spawn in clusters and fly towards the player damaging the them on impact and a battleship class that soaks damage and can fire a lot of bullets. A LOT OF BULLETS. Of course these may suck in practise and I may come up with more, who knows.
-Player abilities/powerups: With the enemies being kitted out the player should be to. Spread shots, fire rate bonuses and the like will be available to the player. How this system works I'm still deciding.
-Levels/Waves: Certain enemies/mechanics I want to introduce over time so I'll be setting up a basic level system. The enemies will become more numerous and stronger as you progress but perhaps you'll get stronger too...
-Sounds & Music: I'm actually going to make a start on the sound design a little earlier than usual. I want this game to have the best sounds and music I've done yet so I'm going to dedicate a lot of time to getting it right. Plus it'll be the first time I'll be writing fast paced songs in a while so it's better I don't rush.
-Tweaks, balancing & everything else: After all that it's a case of tweaking the game to make it as fun as possible. This'll be the bit that takes forever (I'm calling it now) but will ultimately benefit the game the most so it's important.
-Menu & UI: I'm leaving the menus and UI to as late as possible for two main reasons. One I like a minimalist UI anyway so I don't think it will take much time to do (he says), and I also hate making UI elements just to rip them out once the game has been tweaked or altered in some way making certain bits redundant. It's a waste of time on a task I don't like that much anyway.
-Polish: Here's where I spend about two days messing with slight glow effects just to make the bullets look a tiny bit nicer.
And that's the plan, I've three weeks to do as much of this as I can and for once I'm feeling like I'll actually get close to finishing it all (and now I've said that I'm doomed to do fuck all).
-Beau
twitter.com/Bocodillo
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