Adding new features and mechanics:

This week was a little tricky to dedicate time to the game as I was flying back from Spain to Bangkok, working, and to top it up there was an air traffic strike which didn’t make things easier. After around 48 hours I landed in Bangkok and looked around for coffee shops where to get some work done, as being stuck in the room is not the best way to stay productive.

I got up and running some features and fixes I wanted to add to the game sooner than later, to be able to experiment with new mechanics:

1) Destructible terrain: Black squares in the video.

2) New secondary weapon: Mega bomb (pink square).

3) Meteorites! The same black squares, as are just destructible terrain instantiations of the prefab that has attached an extra script to make it move diagonally at certain random speed between a range and has a fire particle attached.

4) Unlock-able items / weapons: For example the Mega Bomb above requires you to activate the skill by picking up an item (The bomb item you see floating in the right bottom corner of the screen)

5) Set a cool down system: For example the current secondary weapon can only be shoot every 5 seconds (be aware of the ugly placeholder art, you can see this at the bottom of the video once the bomb item has been picked up by the player and starts to shoot the pink squares).

6) Added enemy drops: At the moment set to a 25% chance of dropping a +5 health each time an enemy is killed. Will revisit when optimizing game play and difficulty.

7) Did some research regarding the game art direction I want to take: On one end I don’t want to fully invest in this until the game-play is more feature-complete, on the other end is good to advance with solid art when you’re “stuck” with code, or to refresh your view, so is a delicate balance.

Other interesting stuff this week:

• Purchased the book Spelunky, from the Boss Fight Books series and read it from beginning to end this week, was great, got some nice ideas from it, and I plan to do a review as soon as possible, as well as re-read after publishing my first game to find similarities and differences.
• Purchased and started C# 7.0 in a Nutshell , which was not cheap but will help me understand the core of C# as I lack of formal training in this (as well as CS but well… I can hack my way through code after many self-taught hours). After a quick look at the book seems there’s a big part of it I will not be using directly for game development, but seems a great reference guide and I had so many recommendations from other people that I had to purchase it.

• Thrown cash to the Steam summer sale buying a bunch of indie games! The best way to support other indie developers as well as my wallet.
  

Next steps:

– Figure out a way to store score between sessions, as well as display it on Game Over screen and share it.

– Add narrative nodes between random generated levels, for example: Level 0 as tutorial, level n as boss encounter.

– If I get some extra time after this, dig deeper into animations and add some more art that I believe could stay till the finished game.