Day Twenty Three
A short one again - we’re currently preparing the house for a bunch of building work, so not a lot of time for game dev. In terms of actual changes made to the game, I did a few more little bits on the triangle twins but not a lot else.
In terms of planning, though, we had some great conversations last night and this morning about potential changes to shooting and grazing (sticking close to, but not being hit by, enemy bullets and lasers). Generally, most players will be turning on auto fire and just letting the game shoot for them - this is intentional, it’s a great accessiblity feature and there’s not a great deal of purpose for not shooting (discussed a little in the scoring blog post on day 21). Why not make autofire the default? I’ve been meaning to do it anyway, and it removes an input so more people with physical disabilities can enjoy the game.
But that does leave a bit of a gap - currently, you can make sure you kill the boss at the right moment to turn all of its bullets into points. If you’re forced to always shoot, you don’t really have much control over that (beyond the damage boost you get from grazing). We do have a button available now, and a single press of a button is much easier than holding it down, and has much more depth than an autofire toggle. So why not add a massive railgun :D
Everyone loves a railgun. They are objectively the most satisfying weapon class, no you can’t disagree - this is not an opinion. If I do go ahead and implement it, it will charge based on the damage you do to the enemy, with the damage boost from grazing meaning it charges more quickly. The thinking is that this will have a few defensive properties too - if you hit the boss with it, it will stop their current bullet pattern (cancelling the bullets and turning them into points), and if you’ve just been hit you’ll have a short window to fire and recover a life. I’ll add an accessibility option for this to happen automatically, too, because tight timing windows can be difficult for people with a wide array of disabilities - both motor and cognitive.
This is just very early thoughts, though, and won’t even be tested for a couple of months at least. It’s a fairly major change, but it would help make the game more approchable, and would add some depth to gameplay!
What’s next?
More triangle stuff! Fewer thoughts about changing the core mechanics of the game :)
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:
