Flightless Star - Demo
Flightless Star Demo Update - More control to the player and consistent difficulty
It's been a while, 4 months to be more specific. After a 2 month break (because money), I finally came back to the project to deal with some pending features and work around the small (yet extremely important) feedback I received. Finishing the version 2.0.0 of the demo.
First of all, Flightless is no more... the name. Turns out there is already an indie game in development that is called Flightless (from Mole Team 6, looks cute). So, to prevent any future headache or confusion, I renamed the game to Flightless Star.
Why didn't I find this game while I was developing the demo? Weeeeeeeeeeel... during development I named the game FLIGTHLESS, and FOR SOME REASON nothing was named like this... moving on.
So, for the new updates, there is lot of changes (TLDR: New evade action; more configurations; reviewed all stages, twice; assist modes):
- Small visual and sound changes. Reviewed some animations and sound effects. The more substantial changes were in the teleporter, it was looking too boring despite how important it is.
- Reviewed the visuals of the UI and made it more consistent for different screens sizes and aspect ratios.
- Added a new player action, Evade. Its addition solved the problem that most bothered me in the game, that the player couldn't do anything after launching himself to space. It also helped reduce the overall difficulty of the game and gave the player more liberty in its movements.
- Reviewed all of the stages of the game after developing a tester that helped me measure the precision of some jumps.
- Reviewed all of the stages AGAIN after the addition of the evade action.
- After all that, some levels suffered small changes while others were completely remade (like the final stage).
- Added a loading screen and some camera zooms;
- Added a lot more configuration options for the game;
- Key binding configuration: self explanatory;
- Alternate movement in planets: it was greatly requested that it would be more intuitive to move the character around a planet with only the left (counter-clockwise) and right (clockwise) arrows. So I created this new option to enable this movement input.
- Assist mode: after talking and receiving the feedback from one player he gave me an interesting idea of an optional way to reduce the difficulty, quote: "something that shows a previous jump so I don't make the same mistake over and over again" (thanks Matt ^^). So I made it into an assist mode, and created 2 other ones to accompany it. Giving players some options to reduce the difficulty and enjoy the game.
A little side note:
- It was also requested to enable the character to move in rotating planets, but after some testing it was pretty detrimental to gameplay. As the speed of the rotating planets varied a lot and the walking speed was constant it became very inconsistent how you walked around these planets, sometimes you would go too fast, too slow or stay still and walking just made the most precise jumps harder to do (I would just stay still when I needed to jump).
And that's the update. I'm still committed to finishing and releasing this game, but I also don't want to spend more than 6 months on this project, as there are (many) more interesting game ideas I'm excited to work on. So the future is a little uncertain (as always), but let's see how everything will go after this update, as I'm going back to make marketing for the game again and work on the complete game.
If you are interested in following the development of the game, I intend to make more frequent short updates and devlogs in my twitter account: https://twitter.com/LeoNatanoeL.
I hope you have a great day and stay safe.
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