I always love seeing more of your games, so I'm excited to see where this is going. What you describe considering for updates sounds very fun, being able to capture and feminize (not necessarily in that order) civilians and enemy pilot bosses sounds very fun.
I think it'd be cool if there were Space-Invaders-esque sections between larger boss fights, and you'd capture the pilots of those smaller ships instead of "civilians", since I can't exactly see how that'd tie into the boss fight?
I’m glad to hear! I think I’m gonna take short break from the jams and try build up on this.
Was thinking something like a classic shmup/bullet hell stages with a boss at the end and a short management/power up between. You’d assign the captured in different parts in the mother ship, collect what was produced during the last stage and buy upgrades or lives and bombs, depending how arcade like I want this. The civilians would just be numbers, but when you capture a boss you’d also assign them and get image(s) showing how they transform in their field.
Yeah no idea why I didn’t think of capturing the pilots ahah, makes a lot of sense. For some reason I had the idea of all the smaller ships before the boss being drones, and you’d collect scrap off of them for more ships/lives. And then there would be transport ships with civilians you could capture somehow, and maybe be punished if you shoot them down. Ooh maybe there should be 2 guns, the normal one which blows up ships and the hypno beam that is slower but the enemy self destructs and ejects an escape pod.
Thanks for the comment, always love to read em. Having a bit of a slump in motivation and new ideas. Probably taking my time with this one, would really like to nail the gameplay even if most people probably wont care that much.
Yeah, that drone and transport idea is probably overcomplicating things. A blend of simple mechanics and new ideas is good for a game, adding that sort of complication would probably distract from the main focus: the hypno and TF, and the management aspect.
One thing I hope you can implement in the game is a gallery of some sort. One issue with a lot of these real-time TF games is that you don't really get to appreciate the TFs when you're actually doing the fighting, or you risk getting distracted.
I love that idea of the normal vs hypno gun! Probably the hypno gun would be worse in some way, either less accurate, or takes more hits to defeat a ship.
I'm definitely looking forward to seeing the upgrades, although I feel like you might want to start the ship off with a lower fire rate/projectile number per shot, so it can get upgraded more later.
Also, I had an interesting idea: What if, when you captured people, each area you assigned a person to had a sort of "representative" who would slowly TF as you added more prisoners to that section of the ship. That way you wouldn't have to make art for each prisoner, but could still get the experience of TFing them.
Yeah probably scrapping the scrap idea, but might make the smallest popcorn enemies drones that won’t be affected by the hypno gun.
Gallery is probably a must. And I might add a downtime between the boss forms to have some time to check the side panel, though the downtime can get a bit frustrating if you’ve gotten bored of the arts.
Yeah and I kinda would want it to have some other effect too, maybe it would slow down the affected ships shooting speed or something.
Might keep the upgrades pretty tame if I even go that route, I do like powerful and interesting upgrades and rpg mechanics but I’ve heard they are a bitch to balance.
Yeah exactly! Though I was thinking that the representative would be the boss character, so you’d get to see how they turn out. But it would mean I need more levels and boss characters, or make the level replayable and you’d capture the same character multiple times. And the first run should be really easy and fast. I could explain the same character with that the enemy species use clones or something ahah. Was thinking there should be at least a milking area and maybe one transformation would be a new pilot.
Pretty into this project, but I’ll take it slower this time and try to engineer it a bit better so I can actually scale it up. Maybe I’ll try making devlogs and release a bigger update later.
