Post-Holiday Progress

Greetings to all of you who read this post! I hope you all had a wonderful time with your friends, family and beloved during christmas and that this new year will offer you many enjoyable adventures.

But enough with these seasonal greetings. Being here probably means that you are intending to read about our latest developments with Space Hawk, so that's exactly what I'm going to try and deliver.

As has been mentioned in our last post, we had plans for the addition of a shop to give the player the ability to upgrade his or her ship and add extra fire power with the use of drones. To be able to afford these upgrades, the player is required to shoot down enemy ships to collect scrap as a means of currency. As I'm writing this post, this scrap has been implemented and a multitude of drones is up and running as well. Still being worked on are the ability to upgrade the player's ship and the shop itself for the players to spend all their hard earned scrap at.

The game does now save the player's progress in a XML file, meaning that when the game is shut down and started at a later time, the player's upgrades, score, scrap and campaign progress will be reloaded and continued from.

As part of making the moments between the individual levels more enjoyable we have made some progress on a world map to be shown between Worlds. (WIP)

To be clear: we plan to have Space Hawk's campaign consist of multiple worlds, each consisting of multiple levels. We plan to let the world map (in combination with some intermissions between certain levels) add some sort of a story between all the shooting and to provide the player with a sense of fulfillment when/if he/she completes the game.

During boss battles, the player's model is now being scaled down to emphasize the sheer difference in size between the player and the boss, and to make it easier for the player to dodge the boss's bullets. This way the boss battles can be made more difficult than the average wave without making it (completely) impossible for the player to dodge the incoming bullets.

The mechanics behind the boss itself have also been upgraded. Now the bosses have a health bar, have the ability to consist of multiple stages and have their own specific behavior. For instance, this next Super Worm boss (WIP) consists of a head which shoots three bullets and several body parts which each shoot a single bullet. Though this might already sound quite minacious (or not), it is when the player kills one of the worm's body parts that the true fun begins.

For when this happens, the body parts behind the destroyed part will form a new worm, increasing the amount of bullets being shot at the player, while the parts in front of the destroyed part will continue trying to shoot the player, thus intensifying the battle as it continues.

With these kind of bosses in mind, we hope to encourage the player to come up with tactics on how to fight their boss battles and to make each boss stand out from the others.

Other things we plan to be working on in the coming week are things that will make Space Hawk's gameplay more enjoyable. With that I mean the following: more levels to play, more diverse enemies to encounter, more bullet patterns to be shot with, more bosses to battle, more music to enjoy listening to, more sound effects to hear the enemy ships be destroyed, more sprites to make the game even more beautiful, the upgrades to improve the player's stats, the shop to acquire said upgrades and drones, dynamic difficulty to make the game enjoyable for newbies and veterans alike, a tutorial world for those wishing to learn how to play the game first, and last but not least: the main menu.

In other words: lot's of fun (in combination with stress) for us to be had in the coming week, but it will help us getting closer and closer to the point where those who want to play Space Hawk, can play Space Hawk in the way intended.

Once again best of wishes for this new year of opportunities, and until next time!