Implementing the game's goal and player's reactions

Note: Apologies I have not posted for a while I have been busy catching up on group work due to one of my group team members not completing on of his tasks on time that one of my group tasks relied on (he did have a good reason though).

Another note: A earlier in the year I applied for a Masters Degree in Hong Kong with BAFTA scholarship funding. Recently I received an offer for a place on the course. With in mind, and my group project stuff going down the pan I have had a mountain of things to manage lately. This is one of the reasons my blog posts have not been as frequent as I have wanted them to be, and why my game has not been updated on Kongregate.com as frequently as I want it to be.

Ideas:

At the moment my game contains a grind mechanic that has been well developed. Now I need to implement a goal for the player. My idea for this is, to make the player see how high a score they can get ad try to beat it. Like Tetris, it is essentially who looses the best.

The main idea being, the player mines a planet for "Mass", and the player goes to the trader and exchanges it for money or fuel, (I will decide which one after some play tests). I will add an enemy ship for the player to shoot, include a shooting mechanic and add a new resource into the economy called "ships" or "score". This will be so the player can keep track of their score. Also I could progress this by when an enemy ship has been blown up it could leave some cargo for the player to collect. For example they enemy could hold a valuable resource, like fuel or currency in it's cargo hold or more "Mass" resources for trading. With this the enemy ships could attack the player, thus the player needs to repair the ship, and upgrade cargo holding and so fourth.

I could also add achievements into the game (but that's not for a while yet, if at all depending on time constraints).

Implementation:

With the enemies I implemented one into the game. One enemies would randomly appear and travel to the middle of the game world and then attach the player if they were in range using a path finding. So the enemy would follow an array of nodes then follow the player. When the enemy finds the player it starts firing a bullet towards the player. When the bullet contacts the player, the player's health depletes. When the player's health reaches zero. They hit the game over screen. The player has a maximum health value of 10 (integer).

The player can fire a bullet back at the enemy ship by click the scroll wheel on the mouse (or middle click). When the bullet is instantiated, it fires in the direction the direction the player is facing. When the bullet hits the enemy collider, it decreases the enemies' health value by 1 (the enemy has a total of 3 health). When the enemies health reaches zero, the enemy dies and response where it started and the player's score increases by an integer of 1. This goes to the player's GUI (there is 3D text near the HUD).

However with the enemy AI I was not quite sure how to implement it into the level. That's why it had a strange entry into the level.

Player reactions:

Players liked the AI and the new mechanic, but many commented on how the enemy ship should patrol around each planet rather than in the middle of the star system.

Players also suggested implementing a laser rather than having shooting a bullet due to the theme of the game.

The enemy should follow the player when they are with in a certain range of the player and stop moving when too close to them.

Amendments for next iteration:

For the enemies I will experiment with them patrolling a planet. I.e. One enemy ship, flies around a single planet in a loop. This should add some challenge to the game since the player has to avoid each enemy whilst trying to mine a planet.

I will also implement the laser system since a many players asked for this feature. It also fits the theme more and it's more responsive and faster since my target audience it teenage males and those in their early twenties. With this in mine the laser is a lot faster and more rewarding.

Also with following the player, I will try implementing this feature using ray casting since this feature is more efficient for finding out weather the player is in range of the enemy. Also if the enemy is too close to the player, they will hit the player and eventually push them infinitely
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