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Dev Log: Procrastination and Anxities

Wow this has been a month, hasn't it?

I kinda dropped off the face of the planet again. I had a dangerous combo of a little bit of anxiety followed by a visit from my family. This full combo took out about two weeks of time. Whenever I take a long break from something it always takes me forever to get back into it, and that's what happened here. I took a long break from my dev stream and didn't really touch any Sky Sisters stuff. I get this build up of really bad anxiety that does everything in its power to stop me from working on stuff again.

I'm climbing back in the saddle now though at least. I started on some bug fixes in Sky Sisters and started working on some last lingering tasks. I've started to dig more into distribution options for the game as well.

So, yeah, sorry. This happens in my brain sometime and it takes awhile to get over, but making this post should be a good lead into working again. I have a small trip coming up this weekend but hopefully that wont derail me too hard. I'm dreading the holiday season coming up though as that usually means total destruction of my work habits. I just hate how every time I fall off the rails at all it takes me forever to climb back on. I'm probably not the only one with this issue though!

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Posted October 19th 2016 12:05 AM (General)

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Posted October 1st 2016 2:07 AM (Doodle)

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Dev Log: Upgrade Queued

One of the main pieces of feedback I recieved about Sky Sisters was something like "it would be nice if the players had a proactive goal instead of just reactive goals." Meaning that instead of just dodging things all the time it would be cool if the players could work toward some goal.

Right now the idea is to have some sort of outline of a shape in the arena. The players can use the orb to trace that shape. Whenever a lap is completed the shape will change into something more complicated. Right now I have this tied to getting upgrades, which I'm still a little unsure of. The first time you complete a lap you unlock an upgrade. The second upgrade requires two laps, and every upgrade after that requires three laps. I have yet to try this out with two players though. I kind of like the upgrades always coming every 3 or so events, but it also seems like the most worthwhile reward that this shape tracing thing can give you.

This might have to go through a lot of refinement as right now even I find it tough to find time to complete laps around this thing during all the madness of the gameplay. Having a proactive goal though also introduces the problem of cheesing certain events so I have to come up with ways to address that as well. Basically I don't want the optimal strategy to be to leave events running as long as possible to get more upgrades. We'll see how this turns out through play testing, and this might have to be something I possibly address or change after the first release of the game.

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Posted September 30th 2016 2:50 PM (General)

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Posted September 30th 2016 11:22 AM (Doodle)

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Dev Log: Enemy Shields

I keep mentioning ways to keep both players involved in the gameplay of Super Sky Sisters in my recent posts. Here's yet another way I've tried to address this issue!

I've introduced the ability for enemies to spawn with shields that can be either red or blue. These shields operate in the same way that the Orb shield does just placed on enemies instead of the Orb. It's a pretty straight forward challenge: red shields can be destroyed by player 1 and blue shields by player 2. This means that situations will develop in the game where you are forced to switch who is doing the shooting at times.

Another scenario that can arise as the game goes on is stacked enemy shields. Enemies can have more than one shield on them! So this makes switching who is doing the shooting even more important as now players will have to trade off multiple times in order to take down a single enemy.

So far I'm pretty happy how this change has effected the game, but I've yet to see it in an actual two player situation. I'm looking forward to my next play test opportunity as there's now a load of new things to test!

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Posted September 29th 2016 7:13 PM (General)

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