Day 6

Today’s theme was improving the communication with the player in the menus on-screen text and in-game. A group of friends are play testing and providing useful feedback that I want to get into the game as soon as possible.

• Tweaked the flight path of Silver aliens and sped up the animation
• Tweaked the flight path of Sapphire aliens so they don’t all hurtle towards certain death
• Tweaked palette flashes when aliens are hit to only illuminate bright colours and not the whole palette
• Limit the number of explosions when completing a level or emit a Smartbomb to avoid the game slowing down
• Made power-ups sparkle to distinguish them from aliens
• Reworked the “training” missions so that they are not labelled as such and properly incorporated teaching players how to play into the game
• Added player HUD overlays in the opening seconds of the first levels to help orientate new players
• Added on-screen prompts when entering a new zone or completing a zone.
• Power-ups in the Asteroid game now drop down the sides of the screen, where it is most unsafe for the player to be.
• Power-ups in the Evade game now drop down the centre of the screen, where it is most unsafe for the player to be.
• Created 5 Zones (levels) of increasing difficulty. Each Zone has between 6 and 8 objectives to complete.
• Added procedural difficulty increase.
• Tweaked alien spawn rates.
• Fixed the rejection of off-screen sprite collisions.
• Fixed a couple of crashers.
• Fixed an RNG bug and rebalanced all alien behaviours as a result.
• Added a “3D” for in-game status messages

Here’s an example of how the new on-screen messaging/prompts look: