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.

Ive never found such a rewarding bug:

Not only was I collecting 1000s of gold a second it made me realise how damn fun it is to collect 1000 gold a second, oh and I was LITTERALLY killing 100s of enemies a second which is less fun than you would think lol. The fps was pretty solid (15-28) considering I was getting a 1000 combo every few seconds and there must be 100s of wingman projectiles and countless collision detections going on.  I might have to tweak my scroing, 1 billion points within a few minutes.. I dont think the variable types in flash have the capacity to store much more than 3 billion.

I wish all bugs were this fun.

 Well for the bosses Ive had a few ideas. My main plan was to go with a system with a central boss that is surrounded by satalites, each of the satalites would move in formation with its surrounding satalites and do different things each level. After a load of thought Ive decided to go with a more  ‘Warning Forever’ style boss system. The problem with the Warning Forever system is it works in the opposite way to a typical scroller, in that as you dismantle the boss, it gets weaker. I dont really have any ‘elegant’ solution to this so my system will basically use modifiers to alter the behavour of each turret as the other turrets die. The idea is to spread power over the boss almost evenly, there are 10 turrets doing 10 scary things, and you destroy 3 of them, I want the other 7 turrets to do dispraportionatly more damage than they did alongside the ones you destroyed. This way the boss will slowley get harder.

Its a little more complicated than that though, the central ‘hub’ of the boss will have a seperate health bar, getting the hub health to around 50% will automatically start blowing up parts of the boss. Once the boss hits another % possibly 30, all the parts will blow up automatically giving you a ton of powerups to collect before the central boss enters its beserk mode. This is a pure straight forward bullet hell sequence, It should be quite alot harder than the rest of the bosses life span, but will only last a short time. Now, to make this system worth while from a scoring point of view, if you dismantle the boss early, its health will stay the same, so if you never hit the center, but completly remove all the bosses outer parts, the boss enters beserk mode - very early. The up side to this is the turrets never have to self destruct, and you get a ton of points. Also by destroying the outer -> inner nodes of the boss you get even more points, which means holding fire untill the moment were the boss just gives you a quick peek of its outer most turrets, on the harder bosses at least :P.

Anyway thats my system, oh I forgot to mention I have roughly 16 unique turrets down on paper, obviously 16 is a lot and some turrets might be scrapped or altered, but theres more than enough variety if I combine the turrets in different ways for interesting challenges. My aim with the bosses is basically to have a system that is quite flexable and easy to understand from an editing perspective, and also to make sure the bosses are fun alone, the game doesnt need any actual levels, just bosses to stand on its own feet.

Ugh long post, heres a CONCEPT of the bosses I would like, It may look nothing like this in game, I just wanted to make sure its going to look damn cool. I think its better to go with  vector graphics as apposed to bitmaps due to them rotating without going a bit blurry, although a bit of detail is lost, I think the added functionality of this system is worth paying the price of a bit of fine detail.

Boss Concept

Oh and my system should hopfully allow for bosses that span many screens, I will have to test it from a performance perspective, so its not deffinate, but if it works these bosses truly will be Massive Entities I shall update again once Ive made more progress.

Most of the last post can be ignored. The problem was the same problem I thought it was, just in a very small part of my code. I wont have to rewrite the whole damn ga-a-ame, just a few little bits :).

For anyone interested I simply forgot to remove an event listener before ‘deleting’ an object, so it wasnt being picked up by the garbage collector. It would have gone unnoticed if the listener wasnt crammed with cpu heavy drawing operations.. erk. I always assumed listeners would dissapear with the object they are linked too. This article cleared it up for me.

Ill have more screenshots up when Ive got a nice level together, and a boss or two, I have to remember to use the SLOW MOTION feature I built into the game to take proper screenshots next time lol.. duh!

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.