Tonight I added something fairly conventional to Galactic Gladiators: health indicators for enemies that take more than one hit.
The smaller fighters still explode with a single shot, so they don’t need one. The heavier support ship now reveals a small health bar after its first hit, which immediately makes it clear that this particular ship is tougher.
That worked rather nicely.
So naturally I tried the same idea with the mothership.
The plan was simple: give the mothership an integrity level. Shoot it enough times and, rather than destroying it, you damage it badly enough that it retreats.
Technically, it worked.
As a game mechanic, it was rubbish.
You could largely ignore the battle taking place around you, concentrate your fire on the enormous mothership and fairly quickly persuade it to bugger off.
Not exactly the epic encounter I had in mind.
That led to a more interesting idea.
The mothership is now protected while its defending ships are active. Shooting it during this part of the battle still produces the shield impact, but doesn’t damage the ship itself.
Once its defences have been dealt with, a vulnerable point becomes exposed on the underside of the mothership.
Now you have something specific to aim for.
Hit the rest of the ship and you’re still firing uselessly into its protection. Hit the vulnerable point and the MOTHERSHIP INTEGRITY display appears and you start doing real damage.
Eventually its integrity reaches a critical level and the mothership retreats. It isn’t destroyed — which also leaves me with the possibility of bringing the same ship back later, perhaps carrying the consequences of this encounter.
There’s still more work to do on the battle. In particular, I’m not entirely happy with the smaller fighters yet. Their firing can feel unfair rather than challenging, and they’re sometimes difficult to distinguish against the background.
But that’s becoming one of the more enjoyable parts of this experiment.
I started Galactic Gladiators asking:
Can Visual FoxPro do this?
Increasingly, the question I’m asking is:
Would this actually make the game more fun?
And those are turning out to be two very different questions.
