From last week: “the massive new feature I added with no external testing just kinda works…”

Turns out it doesn’t ;) but that’s fine, I mostly expected that. It isn’t really bugs though, it’s more balance tweaks that needed to be made! And those have all been made now.

Turns out when you fire a giant laser, people like it to do a little bit of damage. Who knew.

I did also manage to finish the tutorial, which is cool - it only took me about 4 hours. It’s… not necessarily my finest design work, but it does the job for now. I’ll be changing the text til the game releases, probably, and I want to add an option to choose whether to autofire the laser, but I think this 30 second little warm up is good enough for onboarding. Before I upload it tomorrow, though, I’ll add something like “Press R to skip/restart the game” at the bottom, which also lets the player know that R is quick reset! Handy.

Honestly, this tutorial is a really quick hack, but it does do the job and isn’t super intrusive. It will have to do for now, I’m sure people will complain if they really hate it.

Tomorrow on my day off I’ll upload a new version with a bunch of fixes and the new tutorial. This is going to change scoring, but scores should be higher on average, and the max should also be higher. I’ve made it a bit more consistent, too, each Pentagon phase change now starts with a specific pattern. The big spin attack in the intro, then the pale aimed splitting bullets, then the red area splitting bullets, then the pentagram, which is largely unchanged (though I made timings a bit easier).

What’s next?

Upload the new version, then I really need to crack on with more content.

I hope you enjoyed reading about my Polyfury progress. If you have any questions or thoughts, please feel free to leave a comment below. Thanks for reading, and maybe check out the demo: