Thursday 6 April 2017

Oh no, I'm adding Power Ups

Just when you thought the game was near ready, I decided to have a go with adding Power Ups, maybe even the kind of gems you can get with in-app purchases.

So far I only have three in-game buttons with ammo counts on them, and when they're empty, they slide away.


At the moment they don't do anything other than count down and slide away. But here's what I want to do with them:

- Top one should buy you some time to finish your level. Maybe 10 to 20 seconds.
- Middle one hits all enemies on screen with a blast. I guess that will be for UFOs only. Maybe it switches off blackholes, comets, sunflares for a while too.
- The one at the bottom turns on protection against lasers and collisions for a little while.


Configure that Rocket!

One idea I've had for a long time is to be able to configure the rocket by tuning variables like power, steering, weight and strength. That's just what I've done with this first version of the Rocket Configurator. You get to it from the Play screen:


Power is obvious. Steering effectively gives it more powerful steering jets, turning the ship more quickly. Weight makes the rocket lighter and direction changes easier. Strength is how well it handles collisions with rocks and planets.

The player can't max out all four variables. If each variable has a range of 0..1, the sum of all can only go up to 2 and the default is [0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5].

It would possibly, maybe, be cool to have this configurator on the Apple watch and be able to change it at any time. But that's a stretch goal.