Devlog - Testing

This devlog will cover changes made to the game in response to the week 12 testing session.

Beefing up the combat

One piece of feedback from the testing session was that fighting the enemies didn’t feel super satisfying. I felt that this was due to a couple things:

• The fighting didn’t feel nice, in a tactile sense
• The enemies didn’t behave in interesting ways

To address the first point, I added explosion animations to the robots upon their destruction. With this change I aimed to make destroying the robots feel more satisfying. Additionally, I created some animated art for the laser beam, to make it look nicer and feel more powerful.

Before

After

For the second point, I felt that the robots movement pattern was boring: the just flew at the player in an (almost) straight line. To make fighting the enemies a little more engaging, I implemented some code to make the robots avoid the laser beam, while still chasing the player. I feel that this small change makes the robots feel a little more sentient and more interesting enemies to fight.

Before

After

Another piece of feedback which I felt was related to the first was that the game felt repetitive. Previously, the player would just hold down shoot, while running away from the swarm of robots.

To make the combat a little more dynamic and encourage the player to mix things up, I added a laser ‘overheat’ meter. As the player shoots the laser, the meter drains. If it decreases fully, the player is unable to shoot for a period of time. When the player ceases to shoot, the meter refills.

What this means is that the player is forced to wait for the meter refill at times during the game, which encourages them to use the flight mechanic to dodge around and reposition.

Overheat meter runs out mid-fight, forcing the player to fly away

These changes were all inspired by the feedback from the week 12 testing session, and make the combat a lot more interesting and fun than it was previously.