Stats and Feats and Stuff
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.
February 21st, 2009 at 7:23 am
any time frame for release? i’m super pumped for it
February 21st, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Ive said before I dont really know. Its unpredictable how long each thing will take me. Making the levels could be a matter of days or weeks. I just dont know untill Ive done them. Although Ill be doing a beta earlier than the release.
February 25th, 2009 at 12:17 am
How about that, if you win the regular game on a difficulty higher than the lowest, that you unlock a single extra level with is about 5 times harder than the entire game? You start out with a certain amount of money to buy cards in the beginning of the level (you could use that for endurance as well) and then you play the level.
February 25th, 2009 at 5:20 am
Survival is kinda like that. Except you play a quick bonus round to earn the money to spend in the shop, then the level is infinate and randomly generated.
Also forgot to mention most of the unlockables are unlocked by completing a task related to the unlockable, so for example the flame thrower requires you to kill alot of enemies at close range.
February 25th, 2009 at 8:56 pm
I was thinking that the extra level is actually finite (and also short), but contains a single boss who is much harder than any other boss. Also, I had the idea of cards that have only a temporary effect, e.g. you start the level with a full adrenaline bar.
February 25th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
Ive considered one use cards, like, you can use it once in a certain situation, like if your health drops below 50% you get full addrenaline, or something like that. The idea of having disposable cards is really good, the cards are pretty much done now I dont wanna change anything.
As for the bosses Im not sure how theyll be yet, I just wanna tackle the levels. Ive considered adding an extra boss to the end of the boss mode. But Im starting to think the bosses need some extra attention, maybe a boss generator. Its a hell of alot of work to change logic at this stage though.
Im currently trying to balance certain things out and find out which maps are the most fun, it seems simpler, more chaotic maps are actually more fun that heavily planned complex sequences. Which is good, less time required :D.
March 1st, 2009 at 11:43 pm
IMO:
- Randomness is good but try to make sure that randomness isn’t stupid (ie, a bunch of enemies immediately flying off the screen before you can shoot them or they can shoot you)
- I would REALLY like to see some bosses where the fight may be dramatically different depending on what order you kill their subsections. A very simple example would be: one section shoots traditional bullets, one section shoots homing rockets, one section moves around and shoots lasers. Each section you kill, the remaining sections are healed and they shoot MUCH MORE shots. So leaving rockets for last would mean you’d have to deal with A LOT of rockets.
March 2nd, 2009 at 12:28 am
PiousFlea, THANKYOU. The bosses are exactly as you mentioned, but healing the turrets after the death of any other turrets allows me to control the boss sequence properly.
Why didnt I think of it lol.