Jan 18, 2017
by Andy Sheehan
With some recent incremental builds that I've been sharing amongst friend I've worked out a fair about of small changes to the core gameplay of From The Sun that have really improved the feel of the game:
- Removed ammunition limit. It wasn't serving a purpose in terms of gameplay, I just added that arbitrarily because it felt like part of how ammunition 'should' work.
- Player color always moves towards ultraviolet on the spectrum when collecting ammunition photons, previously it could go up or down based on the color of the ammunition. That wasn't intuitive and now the behavior is more in line with an intuitive expectation.
- Shots do damage based on their color. Previously player color had no efect on attacks, I had considered using different attack types, such as spreads of shots, for different player colors. Again, this complicates behavior and expectations for the player. By changing the damage of shots the player does not have to have the expecation of that to make use of it, but with that expectation they can make better use of it.
In addition to these smaller mechanical changes I've been updating the tools I've been using to design levels. I was limited to placing individual prefabs in Unity, of which I had created some using splines. I added support for editing splines directly in the Unity editor and I've been able to make much better shapes and layouts for debris clusters. Speaking of debris clusters I also changed the way the planet is put together, now it's a composite of small objects instead of a single large one. It makes breaking the planet down more satisfying.
I've also been learning more about making music with LMMS and it's a lot better on the ears that the previous builds have been. The improvment in the sound quality is primarily from switching from pretty pure tones to sounds created by the triple oscillator provided with LMMS. The sound effects need the same treatment.
Overall the game is getting to a good place and I'm ready to focus more on building out levels and improving the audio and visual assets..