Thousander Club Update: April 30th

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 262.25 (previous year) + 86 (current year) = 348.25 / 1000
Game Ideas: 616 (previous year) + 32 (current year) = 648 / 1000

Monday: Increased challenge gradually by adding an extra bomb for the aliens to drop each level. Now level 11 doesn’t look and feel like level 1. I still have to tweak some settings, though. It seems that after a certain level, you can’t really tell that there are extra bombs. I will probably need to increase the rate of fire as well as increasing the maximum number of bombs.

Tuesday: Fixed the game over menu. It now restarts the game if you pick the appropriate selection.

Wednesday: Increased challenge again by increasing the rate of enemy fire. Now when you get to a later level, it doesn’t have nearly as much resemblance to older levels. In a way, it now kind of resembles those shooters in which there is nothing but a shower of bullets to navigate through. I also thought of a few more ideas that might make the game more fun and fair in light of the challenge increase. Adding features this late in the schedule probably isn’t the best thing to do, but as I didn’t have much of a schedule, I suppose I can’t be “off track”.

Thursday: Made some minor changes. For instance, the player’s bullet appeared too far above the actual ship, which wasn’t too noticeable before, but now that you can shoot the bombs, it was frustrating when you miss one that you shouldn’t have.

I spent the past few days watching people play the game.

While I didn’t spend more than a few hours on game development this past week, those hours really made a difference.