jdnx429

Well, things keep moving along with Aliens Over Hawaii. If I could spend a full 8 hours each day working on the game I probably could have started it and finished it in a month, but real life and the job takes up most of my time. I’m not complaining, though, I’m glad to still have a job in this economy even though my new commute is now an hour long each way.

At this point I’ve finished coding up all the main enemies and started programming & drawing the 8 bosses. I have a real good idea of how the final boss is going to be and a couple of the other ones, but I only have some notes on the rest.

I’m also in the process of balancing the stages, making sure that there aren’t many easy enemies on the later stages or lots of hard enemies on the early stages. I have also have to make sure that Hard difficulty is just hard but not impossible. I originally had 4 difficulty levels – Easy, Medium, Hard and Very Hard but I think I’ll stick to the just the first three. The Very Hard mode was very frustrating.

At this point, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to include music in the game. I still have to figure out how I want to do sound effects as well. If the game makes a noise every time a shot or laser is fired, the game will quickly become annoying.

In addition, I’m getting a bit worried about the game size. Currently it’s running just under 2.5 MB. With additional sound effects and music, the size will quickly grow. I also don’t want anyone to be waiting for 5 MB download before starting the game.  I may host the music here on this site and have it load as the player plays through the stage, but we’ll see how that works out.

There still a lot of work to do and about six weeks left do it. I suspect I will get lots done this weekend since it seems like we’ll have a weekend full of rain here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Anyways, here a couple of more screenshots for the game.