Well, I got a working prototype and, as is usually the case, I’ve found that it’s not really what I want. The game depends on being exciting – there must be constant action. It needs to constantly put you in peril, and you need to constantly be able to escape. Unfortunately, I haven’t captured that. It just feels very easy at this point, even when I set every parameter to as high as they’ll reasonably go. Doing the math, it seems that around 60%, if not more, of the incoming asteroids are not a threat at all (and, in fact, serve to block more asteroids), which is a problem. I’m thinking that the randomness of it might not be working, or maybe it’s the uniformity of everything being an asteroid.

Possible solutions:

• Incentivize staying on the home planet somehow (and make it possible to do so). Or, have some other thing that, rather than saying, “DON’T be under the asteroid when it hits”, have something that forces or encourages the player to be somewhere specific. You could gain a bonus from mining an asteroid.
• Do exactly the opposite – destroy asteroids after the player steps on them
• Make the player control two characters simultaneously.
• Strategically send asteroids to be extra-problematic for the player.
• Add more obstacles. I mean, it is space, so adding lasers shouldn’t be a problem. Then you’d have to use asteroids for cover (and then the game could send all the asteroids from the useless direction) or something.

In any case, I suppose I’ll do a bit of graphics at this point as a bit of a break. Maybe the secret ingredient might be an absurd amount of particle effects and shaking the screen.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 21st, 2012 at 2:58 pm and is filed under LD #23. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.