For starters : Frantic 2 will be released Thursday 27th August!

Ok now to the problem Im facing. Initially I thought it was impossible to get the score beyond the point where the numbers in flash are forced into negatives, or back around to zero. I decided to go into the game and try my hardest to ‘abuse’ the scoreing mechanisms, by farming bullet scrapes/grazing, killing all enemies at as close range as possible, and focusing all my shop purchases on things that would make this more efficient. So one example is not using wingmen and having it so I can kill selectivly, making sure I always have bullets around to increase my multiplier.

I wasnt skilled enough to really push the multiplier to its potential in the normal modes, but I got it to around 140 before I managed to get myself hit. I tried the same thing in Endurance mode and it got to around 300-400 a few times after getting hit, but it took about 4 levels to get it that high. This suggests a very very skilled player could get the multiplier high enough to break the highscores.

The scoring system iteself is very balanced, and it is actually as low as it will go, for example scraping a bullet will give you 1 point, killing an enemy say 400, a boss 4000, etc.. if I lower these scores the game will give no reason to actually kill enemies, as scraping bullets itself would be profitable enough to not even bother with enemies, and bosses would just be roadblocks to get to more bullets. I cant limit the multiplier as skilled players would not be rewarded, and highscores would plateau.

So what to do! My current and only solution would be to have a counter, once it counts to say 100, the actual score is increased by 1(c-=100; s++;), effectivly dividing the score by 100 and making it impossible to get game breaking score. The downside to this is now players wont get ridiculous highscores on average. From testing it seems players get between 50-200 million points on a first attempt. This would now be a boring 0.5-2 million, 2 million being more rare than those around 0.5. But this would convert a v.v.high 10,000,000,000(breaks scoreboard) into a 100,000,000(fine).

Is there a better solution? I really dont want to have to make the scores boring and low, pfft, who wants a tiny 0.5 million score!

Ive come across a huge flaw in the design of the Frantic 2 code. Im working on fixing it but from my estimates, and running lots of tests, Im pretty sure Im going to have to re-code the whole ‘core’ of the game. The problem doesnt stop the game from working or cause any major crashes or anything, but its big enough to warrant scrapping everything Ive done so far.

Ive done a lot of research and its a problem that is pretty obscure to spot, and will only occur 5-20 minutes into gameplay at random. I know how to fix it, but the effort I would put into fixing it would be little less than starting from scratch, what Ive learnt from making Frantic 2 will no doubt improve any systems I write in the revised version. I also have a plan for making the game run alot more smoothly, allowing me to add more silly effects, enemies and bullets.

Its not all as bad as it seems, most of the work in Frantic 2 so far has been in the design and tweaking of the subtle mechanics, creating and putting the graphics into the game, creating the menus, and a bunch of other things I can simply drag and drop into the new version. Not to mention I have a set of working level editors built into the game.

Hopfully it wont be too big of a delay for the sequel, as Ive got most of the games logic fresh in my mind and should easily be able to re-code it. I dont want to release a ‘broken’ or less than perfect game.  Ill post an update when Ive made more progress.

I decided to get a blog.. wooo.