My (Almost Crushingly) Honest Friends

So, remember the small play test version of the game I released? Yeah, basically unplayable.
Just kidding! Only mostly unplayable! In fact it was a fantastic opportunity to step back and have a look at what other people thought of my game, and my first notion was;

Ease of Play
 Far too many of the people I asked to test my game (Including my dear, ancient father) found it was nigh impossible to understand what was going on, and the game was so punishingly difficult that there was little chance to experiment in game. Well, fristly, I've implemented a but of logic to make the difficulty scale over time. At the minute that's not really working properly, but the game is at least quite easy. I'm also implementing a tutorial level, with one simple enemy that constantly respawns, allowing the player to get used to the controls in a less stressful environment. I also had responses that, as the ship is symettrical, it would be useful to have animations that showed plainly which direction the ship was facing, and this is something I'm still working on, as it's difficult to design a UFO with a nice grill on the front that still looks inkeeping with the aesthetic, but then maybe that's where I'm going wrong...

Fire at Mouse
At first I was of the notion that it would make it cool and difficult if I forced the player to have only one direction of fire. This was stupid. It's not fun to lose a game because the game mechanic is deliberately hobbled. Hence I've now added a 'fire at moust cursor' function, whereby the player clicks an area of the screen and the subjugation ray fires in that direction.

Score System
Despite the fact survival is the main point of the game, it was important that players be able to quantify what they were doing. For this I've implemented a score system, whereby players score a small number of points for a successful hit with the subjugation ray and slightly more points for a successful abduction.

In terms of glitches, it was reported that, upon retrying the game the human enemies no longer spawned into the play scene. This was due to a variable that I wasn't resetting at the beginning of each new scene, and has since been fixed. I also made the fade in and out times shorter between each scene. Most irritatingly a bug was reported where, upon being recycled and created in the scene again, human enemies would no longer stun properly, continuing to move but still able to be abducted. I seem to have been able to fix this by using the 'kill' command rather than the 'recycle' command, however this is messy in terms of processing, and I would rather know the exact cause of the problem.

So, here are a few screenshots of the game as it stands here, and hopefully I'll be producing another little demo some time this week, and once again collecting all the feedback I can.

Until next time!
Jack