Saturday, January 20, 2007

An Injection of Fun!

Overlords v0.2
Okay, some changes have been made (including xenofur's suggestion - thanks!), making the endgame much more engaging.
Total changelist:
-The Hero's health has been upped by over 50%, and his speed by 25%. He wasn't quite enoug of a badass in the previous version. Also, he heals 50% faster at allied generators now.
-The Overlord now has three forms - one that only the soldiers (not the Hero) can damage, one that anyone can damage, and one that only the Hero can damage. The last form forces the player to get involved in the battle at least a little, as does the Overlord's new abilities to teleport to the Hero's location, instantly capture adjacent generators, and summon minions around himself.
-There are two new soldier types - Scouts, which have very low HP but are incredibly fast, and Giants, which are very slow but have massive HP and attack power.
-New city again.

I think my next step is going to be to put some actual game structure around it, like a main menu and a GAME OVER screen and all that jazz. Also, difficulty levels.

I think I'm a big behind schedule, but I'll survive!

1 comment:

Xenofur said...

glad i was able to help
and now, some random thoughts on the new version, in no particular order :)

- death animation? it's currently a bit hard to get an actual grip on the flow, it'd help imo if you would see individual soldiers die, even if it's only a two frame pop thingy.

- dash attack: could need some sprucing up as it's currently a bit disorienting, perhaps something like: gametime stops, path lights up, hero zooms along it, blazing a trail, enemies pop as necessary.

- mp meter: give the hero some kind of ingame display perhaps? glow around him, colour change or a yellow pulsing dot in the middle, something along those lines. reasoning: currently it is impossible to the read the hp/mp/target-hp meter with peripheral vision, forcing the player to shift their attention away from the fairly hectic gamefield, take in the information, then get a grip on the changes that meanwhile happened in the gamefield. also, the player doesn't really need to know how many hp he has, all that interests him is: can i dash now?

- hero hp: same as above, some kind of ingame display would make it a lot easier, perhaps by having him get more and more hollow and thin, like the generators do. i noticed that most times when i die it simply happens because i forgot to check my hp bar before attacking something, so it's not my ability to handle the hero that's keeping me back, but my inability to process the informations fast enough due to inefficient layout.

- names on the enemy hp meter? it's sometimes quite difficult to see what one is "look"ing at. =)

- a bit less speed perhaps. i often found myself overshooting the target.

lastly, something i'd advise every game maker to think about: in each game there are two battles. one is lead against the ai and ingame enemies. the other is led against the interface and controls. i always judge games upon these two and how good a game is depends on how the balance between these two looks, the more it tips towards the former, the better is. :)

lastly, keep in mind that i could also be entirely wrong in what i say, please don't take it as gospel. ;)

stopping now before i throw you too much off-track. ^^