Sunday, October 11, 2015

The Adversaries

(This week's build is up here!)

The pace I've been building this game is, obviously, incredibly slow. I've been working on this for about nine whole weeks! Some of those weeks, I added almost nothing to the game, maybe a few particle effects, some audio, and that's it. Or maybe I added a single level, and that's it. So it feels really good to say that this week I added something a bit more substantial: enemies.



One of the benefits to stretching work out this long is that you can let an idea sit for a week and a half before you implement it, and when you implement it, everything just sort of works the way you thought it might, maybe even a little better. I knew it would be a good idea to have an enemy which shoots out projectiles that interact with warp and bounce walls the same way the player does. It reuses mechanics, which is like reusing a theme or shape in a book or a painting. It's more aesthetically pleasing and makes things feel a little more balanced to the player. It's also practical. I know what these things are going to do because I already have something doing the same thing.



I gave the enemies a bounce wall to spawn as a shield whenever the player charges because a) Again, reusing mechanics and b) An idea I had from the very start was an enemy that had to be struck from behind to be killed. It also had an unpredicted effect of c) Making the enemies seem actually quite clever. If you charge them head on, you'll hit a shield which doesn't just stop you, it bounces you away. The harder you attack them in this way, the harder they rebuff you, like tiny little kung-fu masters.



Feature-wise, I could create a few more levels, (10-15 total) and then polish this up and call it a game, or I could create some other features (walls that teleport you specifically to other walls, walls that can be pushed, Walls that disappear or appear only when you are charging) and keep fiddling with things for a few more weeks... I guess we'll see...

And again, the charging-up noise is by Javier Zumer, and is being used under this license.

P.S. "The Adversaries" would make a great band name

P.P.S. I never noticed that the pluralization of Adversary contains the word "Aries"

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