Tonight’s experiments were mostly about feedback and fairness.
I finally added persistent high scores to the pilot profiles. If a player beats their previous best, the score is saved against that pilot and survives restarting the game.
That deserved a little more ceremony than simply changing a number, so the Game Over sequence now announces:
NEW HIGH SCORE!
0000700
I also experimented with a small burst of animated sparkles around it. This turned into one of those wonderfully disproportionate programming jobs where getting a few tiny stars to fly away from some text involved rather more investigation than anyone sensible would expect.
They’re gold now, because the original sparkles were almost indistinguishable from the actual stars. Obvious in hindsight.
The other experiment was with the Mega Ship battle.
The small fighters are deliberately difficult to distinguish when they’re still connected to the Mega Ship, but once the fight starts that was making it harder to read what was happening. I’ve started experimenting with bright cyan/white engine markers to make the individual craft stand out as they separate.
I also reduced the horizontal component of their gunfire by about 30%. The bullets are still travelling towards you at the same vertical speed, but they don’t sweep quite so aggressively across the screen.
It’s only a small numerical change, but it noticeably changes how the section feels.
That’s one of the things I’m finding most interesting about this experiment: sometimes the difference between difficult and annoying is a single multiplier.
Tonight’s discoveries:
- High scores can now belong to individual pilots.
- Apparently high scores require sparkles.
- Sparkles need to be distinguishable from stars.
- Enemy fighters need to be distinguishable from the enormous ship they’re attached to.
- Multiplying something by
0.70can be considered game design.
Visual FoxPro continues to cooperate with this nonsense.