Designing in your sleep
Not being able to get to sleep is excellent for redesigning. I’m now happy with the design for my game, and I even naïvely think I can finish it in time!
Design is:
Space-based sidescroller. Player given the usual 4-way control of an unarmed ship.
Progress through an (absurdly unrealistically dense) asteroid field. Asteroids are static and there is always a fairly large safe path through the field.
From behind the player, homing missiles fire! They are fairly easy to avoid as they react quite slowly to your movements. The missiles can be tricked into colliding with the asteroids. Avoiding them provides a moderate challenge when combined with navigating the asteroid field.
Every X seconds, the missiles stop being launched and instead a gunboat flies through the game area. The gunboat fires volleys of bullets in pretty patterns which the player needs to avoid. The gunboat can be damaged and destroyed by luring missiles into it.
The trick to the design is that the safest way by far to deal with the missiles is to quickly trick them into hitting an asteroid so that they’re destroyed. So if you want to damage the gunboat (for mega points) you’ll need to take the risk of keeping a gaggle of missiles alive. Not only does that mean there’s more missiles trying to kill you, but keeping them all safe from asteroids can become quite a challenge.
Hopefully the end result is a game with dynamic difficulty that is determined by the player’s skill and willingness to take on risk. A less skilled player can play through just dodging everything, whilst an expert would make sure every missile ends up hitting a gunboat.
Obligatory screenshot:
