week 33 - Digression

Welcome back to this week's Juicy Beetle Blog! I know, I know, It's been a while since my last post, and I promised that I would be doing them a lot more frequently, and I apologise. In all honesty though, its been a brutal few weeks since last I posted. So, I recently got engaged, and planning a wedding is a lot of work. Since my partner is an intense compulsive planner, things had moved tenfold in the planning department, meaning I had little time working on the game, and more time focusing on venues... On top of that, I, somewhat had... digressed from this weeks plan-BUT, in all fairness, I think it will be worth it. 

So the last Dev Blog I posted, I mentioned that I would be working on the game-play and fleshing that out. Well I did that for majority of the time, but then I realised that something still was missing. At this point, you're probably thinking that I'm suffering hard from 'feature creep', and you're probably right, but games these days are progressing quite rapidly. Audiences have  a certain expectation  and I wish to deliver! With that, I decided to add 'missions' to my game (they are called missions for now, but later, I would probably call them something else). "What are missions?" you ask. Well, allow me to elaborate.

The missions I intend to include in my game are going to be relatively easy at the start, and progressively get harder the more you complete. Each mission may vary between collecting a certain amount of coins in a single game, to 'avoiding' certain obstacles. Once three missions have been completed, the player will advance to the next level (not stages or anything, but player levels). The player will also receive rewards for completing these missions which can go towards buying new items. I'm actually quite happy- and a little relieved- at the system I've implemented for these missions to function correctly.

​Firstly, I implemented a system which keeps each mission unique, so that players would never see the same mission at any one time. Then, I implemented a system which increases the difficulty once ALL missions of the previous difficulty have been completed. This will help when implementing new missions further down the track. I needed to make sure that there are a number of different missions in total divide by 3, so that one mission wouldn't be over zealous then the rest.
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I'm hoping that this will bring even more retention to the game and add another level of progression (rather than just high score). There are still a few tweaks I need to make for these missions to work, but I'm 'hoping' that I will have these functioning correctly as well as have the game-play sorted!

The light at the end of the tunnel hasn't faded, but it hasn't gotten bigger either, but I will triumph eventually! 

Until next time,

Thanks for reading!