Abduction Action! Game Progress Update 2
It's been nearly three weeks since my last Abduction! update and about two months since initial development begin. Already this game is infinitely further along than Nasty was at this point and I'm still hopeful to be only a month or two from release.
Gameplay has seen a lot of changes in recent updates. The tractor beam now causes Earthlings or objects to shake briefly before they get picked up and they subsequently rise to your UFO much fast than before. This mechanic feels better than the previous "instant launch" way of doing things and will change even more in future versions of Abduction! as each object is given weight. The tractor beam also no longer kills horizontal movement of things in it when you turn the beam off, thus allowing you to effectively "throw" earthlings or objects across the screen.
A new turbo feature was added too, allowing you to quickly zoom across the screen and travel through small arms fire (bullets) without damaging your spacecraft. It has limited usefulness now but should be good for a quick escape in later more difficult levels.
Most of the menus are fleshed out at this point, all that is remaining is setting up the level select screen, adding some logic to the "Buy Now" screen to prevent invalid users from blowing up the game, and adding the high scores (which I intend to use the global high scores component for, allowing players in Abduction! to compete against all others for high scores). I'm implementing all this in a much more reusable fashion too so that ideally it will be very quick to setup the menu system on my next few games.
An unpleasant surprise to come about a week or so ago was the knowledge that someone else already created a game called "Abduction!". My initial Google searching did not reveal this but while search for reference material to draw cows, I stumbled across the game (for Android phones). Since I'm the second game, this likely means that I will have to change the name of my game. I've been kicking around a few different ideas and the name change won't be drastic, but likely expect something different in the near future. I might even run a poll when I get a more solid list of names to pick from.
In a lot of ways, Nasty didn't get as much attention to gameplay as it probably should have, the scope was just too big to adequately make each element feel right (even with ten months of development time). With Abduction!, I'm spending much more time on each area to insure they will have the maximum "fun factor" possible. The game is going to be smaller, but I think it will be better too.
0" style="display:
This article has been view 536 times.
|