jdnx429

Now that the deadline has been pushed back to March 31st, I’ll have a good amount of time to finish the game. Especially since Cleaver told me to go back to work….ha.

I spent a bit of time last last night coding some basic behaviors for a couple of the UFOs, which was kind of fun. I’m looking forward to coding the rest of the enemies. I’ve yet to start on the bosses which I hope will be fun to beat but also a tad difficult.

I don’t want the game to be a simple side-scroller where you have to shoot everything to win. Since the story of the game is that of a lone airplane flying against a fleet of alien ships there will be segments in the game where the best course of action is to sit still and have the UFO pass by in order to survive and reach the mothership.

In a lot of side-scrollers, the enemies fly in a predicatble, repeatable pattern for no reason and I’m trying to avoid that as much as I can. If the enemies are flying in a pattern, it’s because they have a reason for it. They will either be moving to get past the player’s ship or to shoot it. In that respect, I’m trying to get into the enemies head and think about what they would do. Some enemies would just want to ignore the player and be on their way to do their job, some will aggressively attack the player and others will only attack if provoked.

Since the game will be a bit long to do it all in one sitting, about an hour not including deaths, I planned for the game to save the player’s progress after every stage. Each stage consists of 3 two-minute segments plus a boss fight. When I was doing some testing, I realized it was pretty easy to have the game restart at the beginning of a segment so I’ll probably have the game save after each segment. That way progress can be made even if the players only plays for 3-4 minutes. That also means that I’ll increase the difficulty a bit of each segment. I want the player to just get by each segment. It shouldn’t be easy, even on Easy Mode.

Now that the holidays are over and I’ve finished up some other projects that were taking most of my free time, I have more time to code “Aliens Over Hawaii”. I haven’t actually touched the game in at least a couple of weeks. I played around a bit with some side scrolling games on a NES emulator to check out what worked and what didn’t. Nevertheless, here’s a couple of early screenshot of the games, there’s still a bunch of work to do but the look is pretty much solid.

I’ve also noticed there’s been a discussion on the Whirled boards about coin prices and Wyvern giving out loads and loads of coins. I checked when Wyvern was released and added it to the Coin/Bar Ratio graph, see below. It’s location is quite interesting.

Remember, however, that correlation is not causation and there are probably many, many factors influencing the ratio.