We've been making some pretty big progress! Moved the progress meter up from 40% to 60%, based off of our internal to-do list. Sorry, just 1 gif to share today (ok, maybe 2).
Fixing codeSometimes the most important stuff isn't the most exciting stuff to be working on, and that's definitely been the case the last few days with Postal Slime.
A lot of the code done in the game jam was hasty and slightly wrong. Nothing really wrong with that, it was a game jam after all. However, now I have been going back and fixing a lot of things that were wrong. Enemy spawning was a huge issue, and it has been completely re-written. We can now control enemy spawning with weighted randomness on a per-level basis. Basically, this means we have a much more natural way of controlling the difficulty curve of the game. It also means that the further you progress, the more you will tend to see tougher enemies.
We also had a few weird inconsistencies between the Unity environment and the Android device. Luckily all those were cleared up, and we now are seeing the game exactly as we intended it.
Touch controlsTapping and swiping has to feel absolutely perfect for this game to be fun. Our old version had a few inconsistencies in how swiping enemies worked. It wasn't really a problem...until it was. It made the game feel wonky and you stopped trusting that your inputs were being received correctly. Re-working how the tapping worked, and adding in slight invulnerability timers (talking like fractions of a second here) has HUGELY improved the feel while playing the game.
We also wanted to give a little variety in the way the players play the game. That is, wildly tapping and swiping the screen SHOULD work. But it should not be the optimal strategy. So we have an incentive to play smart and make risky decisions. Tapping most enemies at the right time will disarm them, sending them into a stunned state. Any stunned enemy can be swiped for an instant kill! That means that if you can stun enough enemies quickly enough, you can get a major combo bonus going on! But waiting until too many enemies are on the screen can also put you in a risky situation, so it's very important to make good decisions!
It's similar to button-mashing in a fighting game. It can work on some level, and lucky button mashing can beat certain opponents. But skilled players know that playing correctly is far better in the long run, and can take you further than button mashing ever would.
Making little tweaksWe want to add a lot of little details that make the game feel very polished. For instance, when you swipe your finger across the screen, a faint trail appears to show you the path your finger took. This is already a pretty good feedback mechanic for the player, but we wanted to take it a step further. Now, when you swipe on the screen the trail will be colored based on the slime that you are playing as.
It's not the best video, but it gets the point across!
Moving forwardSo what's next for Postal Slime? There's only 2 large tasks that we're facing right now! The first is making a cleaner level transition that feels faster. We want the player to have a little less downtime! Second is implementing an optional tutorial level. The game itself is pretty self explanatory, however there's some neat features that not everyone may pick up on at first, so we wanted to include a way for everyone to be on the same page.
Everything else on the to-do-list is relatively minor or easy to implement. Some balance/changes to certain enemies and the overall difficulty curve needs to be tweaked. A few extra animations to account for the new stunning mechanic. That's it really!
Oh, and we have one more enemy to add...
IT'S A BEAR!
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