I thought I better write another update on the progress of Frantic 2. At the moment Im putting stats and feats into the game. The idea is the game will track certain stats, like amount of kills at close range, or how many seconds total youve spent scraping bullets. Over time these will mount up and reward you with a feat. Each feat will unlock either a new ship, buyable card in the shop, slot in the shop or a new game mode to try.
So far my extra game modes are Arcade - this just removes the shop from the game and buys all your stuff automatically, for people who dont wanna go shopping mid-blasting-spree. Another mode is bosses - fight all the bosses in the game back to back. Ill probably add automatic weapon upgrading, or start you with a good set of upgrades from the beginning, with upgrades earnt in level. These two modes are always unlocked.
The unlockable modes are Survival - this will allow you to play a ‘bonus’ level that just has a stupid amount of money being dropped. Once youve finished this short level youll be given one chance to buy all your weapons and cards, then youll be given a randomly generated level which will get harder every minute or two. The difficulty will begin to sky rocket making it quite impossible to survive.
The other mode is endurance, this mode just allows you to play every level from the game back to back. The levels are organised into 3 ‘episodes’, each once contains 5 levels and should last about 20 minutes play time… give or take. So 1 hour of bullet insanity should class as endurance I think.You will play level 1 - episode 1 in easy mode, lvl1 ep2 in medium and lvl1 ep3 in hard, and so on. I might also restrict the amount of money earnt so you dont end up with the highest powered weapons by level 2.
Ive slimmed down the bosses quite alot since I started making them, I soon realised that the bosses weapons were waaay too complicated. So ive made only a few turret types, two that disable your weapons/wings while active, a laser, rockets, one that will repair the boss while active, and the standard weapon turret that will fire bullet sequences.
So all in all the game is pretty much coded. I have to make all the levels and get some sounds in, and I still have to find some music. Hopfully level editing is easier than predicted and I can make more than 3 episodes. Ide love to have more, but it all depends on how tiring the whole process is.
Ill post some screenshots of the bosses, and some real gameplay soon.