I’ve been quiet for a while, but not slacking. I actually think the game is nearly done, my to-do list is mostly down to small tweaks! Here’s what I’ve done in the last two weeks:
- Added “Bumble-blob” enemies - they putter around more or less minding their own business and dodging asteroids, but occasionally decide to run into you when you’re not paying attention.
- Added enemy ships or “Hunters” - these guys show up after a certain time delay—which gets shorter with each wave. They actively hunt you down and fire seeking missile-blobs at you. They’re very dangerous, but also pretty fun to dogfight with.
- Added scoring stuff - I may change exactly what stats are recorded, but the functionality is all there. It keeps track of your last scores, best scores this session, and all-time records, and there’s an option to clear your scores. I also added wave number and time displays to the in-game screen.
- Added a transition between asteroid waves - now there are blinking indicators to show where the asteroids in the next wave will appear. (Note: unfortunately these have a bug with their animation. I think it’s this engine bug, but maybe I’m just doing something stupid. )
- Fiddled with the default splash/loading screen a bit. My html and javascript skills are minimal, so I’m not sure if I will change this much more. It’s a nicely functional loading screen as-is.
- Added a tiny bit of acceleration to the steering controls - it may seem a little bit weird at first, but it gives you way more precision at small increments, while still allowing you to turn fast.
- Added real sounds. There are a couple sounds still missing, and an occasional bug with pausing the engine sound, but the most important stuff is present and it almost sounds like a real game now!
- Added an annoying performance issue - The game generally runs fine on the machines I’ve tested it on, but they all get occasional huge lag spikes for several seconds. I’m not sure what’s causing this, but I think it’s the sound stuff causing some big garbage collection delays? It’s kind of random and only seems to happen once per play session, so I haven’t been able to profile it yet. If this sounds familiar to anyone, please let me know.
- Spent many, many hours tweaking game balance stats and a bunch of other little things. Mostly the enemy spawn delays and their progression, health, mass, movement speeds, behavior, etc. It’s a hard game, but hopefully not crushing, and hopefully with a decent difficulty curve.
If anyone takes the time to playtest this (link here or in the top post) I would appreciate any feedback you have, especially regarding any usability problems, “what the heck just happened?” moments, or glaring quality issues. I’m hoping to have this polished up for release on Kongregate in a few weeks.
I’ll try to get some cool action gifs up here soon. Sorry for the wall of text!