More background work has gone into Envahi so what I have right now is a stable (as in no crashing) version 0.09 of the game currently in place. Version numbers don’t mean much to me as I just use them to keep track of where I am and will bump the game straight to V1.0 when I consider it finished. It’s handy to start from 0.00 and work up because I keep some development versions as I go along in case I need to go back to something I changed or maybe I broke something drastic and need to skip back a couple of builds.

I rarely have needed to do this but, because I’m so thorough with where I’m at in the notes for each version, I’m covered for most problems just in case. It’s pretty much guaranteed that I’d need to go back or something if I stopped doing it.

Since last entry I’ve done massive changes to the game state and how it processes events because more events are going into the game now – even in a temporary state. I’m allowing for the future adding of stuff like the cities flooding, quit game confirmations, pause game, invasion etc etc.

Previously I’d been putting all sorts of conditional checks into every alien object that was added into the game so each time I added a new event I had to go into each alien to add another part to the check. Stupid idea so I stripped all that out and just have each new enemy check the one flag instead. Much more efficient as I still have more objects to put in yet.

Lots of nice bugs like the grabber causing all sorts of chaos if it collided with another object while carrying players helicopter off the screen. That one caused explosions all over the place as it tried to move the helicopter up the screen with the grabber and tried to make it drop to the city below as it was exploding. Messy one that was.

Additionally, just to make things even more murderous to play at the moment, I added in the city shield so the clouds suddenly became priority to destroy first because the acid rain drops in droves. Ignoring them will cause the city to be destroyed very quickly right now – although I’ll adjust the level later on.

That brings me to the level as I need to start thinking of balance. I’ve got the nibber pretty much ready to go in now – shit graphic as well for now. Once i have them running and eating the dam tiles then I start to look at the level balancing so game starts a little easier and builds up. I’ve implemented a level selection on the title screen mock up for now so I’ll be able to test this. I think the game will start slow on easy mode and build up to level 4 – oh sh&^ gradually. So eventually, if player lasts long enough, then they’re up to that stage anyway. I’m not sure how to handle the scoring to make it fair to the people that play hard straight off, however. Maybe do a “Minter” and adjust the starting score accordingly.

I’m also considering seperating the score tables for each level too. But this is something I’ll think about once I actually have a level system in place.

Categorised as: Competition | Development | Envahi | Game Studio 2 | Syntax Bomb