Whew.
It has been an interesting few weeks. “Interesting.”
But I managed to sneak in a few updates to the game, notably the title screen, text box pane, and a fix. Effectively, the game loop is there. Enemies are spawned, the player targets, and score is calculated. And a reset screen pops up when all four cities are destroyed.
A decision point right now is whether to continue with the “arcade”-style format or go to something of a “story”. I think I can put that decision off until next time though.
I do like the idea (courtesy to Michael Bridges and his course at Udemy) of using quickly developed art assets to focus on gameplay and flow. The text panel I made in Aseprite using the ARQ4 template, this particular template consists of four colors (white, black, and two mid-tones of purple). So it takes 30 seconds and doesn’t look terrible.
It gives a nice basis to build for future assets. Looking at the screenshot now, I obviously used the same ARQ4 template for the cities. Thanks Aseprite!
As for the bug fix, that was handled over a couple of hours in GDScript and involved a fun solution. The program makes a list of the four cities on a startup and when a city is destroyed (and a signal is emitted on this fact) that city is removed from the list. The enemy targeting element picks random cities from the list at the beginning of each round.
While I think about the arcade/story decision point, I’ll work on enemy spoofing within the radar system. I have a few ideas to try with that, with the underlying objective being to increase the difficulty of the game, while it still is winnable. I’ll also work on an ARQ4-based launcher (let’s be honest).
See you next time!
Next Steps:
Title Screen- Radar System
- Enemy spoofs.
- Art:
Text box panel- New interceptor launcher
- Sound/Music
- Future Fixes:
Hostiles continue to target destroyed cities
Tired Fox Projects 