Hey Folks, time for another update on the project! Here's what I've managed to implement over the last few days:
- Wave system: The game is now arranged into waves of enemies, with an enemy spawn pool that depletes over time.
- Upgrade system: I now have 9 different upgrades you can choose to improve at the end of each wave based around power-ups, the palm tree and the player. Here's that full list:
- Increased swim speed: Does what it says on the tin.
- Turtle summoning: Use a conch shell to summon a turtle to get rid of any jellyfish on the screen!
- Palm tree size: Gives the player a longer range to their shot
- Accuracy: Adds a trail to the last launched shot and a pole in the ground, giving you a point of reference to plan future shots with.
- Reduced drop rate: Decreases the slow down/drop effect of bouncing off jellyfish.
- Ammo refill speed: Increases the rate at which coconuts respawn.
- Multi-Shot: Adds 1 extra projectile to a multi-shot powerup.
- Giant Coconut: Increases size of giant coconut by 30%.
- Skim Shot Mininum Speed: Reduces the necessary speed for a skipping coconut to stay above the water.
Upon death, the powerups are lost but I am considering implementing a method of saving one category of your powerups by watching a reward ad.
- Trajectory line mapping: This was on my original to do list and struggled figuring out how to implement this (As something who is pretty meh at maths!) Upon drawing one of the thumbnails for challenges, I added a line to a coconut to give the indication of direction in the image only to realise this was a perfect way of displaying a trajectory line (Leaving the ghost of last shot rather than predicting the current one!)
- Refined the speed of the character: After seeing my dad playing the game (And struggling heavily with the controls), the one thing that particularly stood out was the amount of falling off the island and the twitchyness of the controls. For this, I've slowed the player down further and will be making further changes to accomodate for casual players being unfamiliar with a d-pad setup.
- Lots of tweaks and refinements: Making sure that all jellyfish are effected by each of the powerups in the correct manners, adding a celebration text at the end of each round, improving the spawn code, stopping game-breaking bugs, reducing wave effect by 50% and a variety of other small gameplay refinements.
- Ending slo-mo shot: When you hit the last enemy in a wave, the game slows down.
What next?
- Objectives/Challenges: Currently the upgrade system rewards a point after completing a wave, but I'll also be including an unlock point for completing certain challenges every 3 rounds. These could include swimming a certain distance, certain number of combos or getting a certain percentage of accuracy in a round.
- Accessiblity improvements: As mentioned above, unlike Corporate Salmon it was worrying seeing how poorly my dad managed to pick up the controls. I'll be looking at different methods of making the control methods simpler, such as slowly increasing the player speed over time, restricting the player to the island for the first few rounds to get used to movement.
- In game UI overhaul: I'm going to experiment with several different methods of displaying the interface, making more use of the game screen but also factoring in how to display it around gameplay elements.
Stay tuned for more soon!
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