It was a productive week.
NON TRAILER
PILOTS
First you select your ship, but then you select your pilot. Each of the 20 pilots has different pros and cons. Some increase the likelihood of specific things being dropped from enemies. Others increase attack power or give dash to ships with no dash. Since this project is about me getting better at art, I made art for the different pilots. While they are each similar, using the same template and then modified, they turned out well. These pilots offer more diversity to players to tweak things more.
Some pilots have no bio, so expect tweaks and more pilots to come.
NEW SHIP: DUCKY
Ducky is similar to Slipstream. There is no dash, Ducky is quick, but frail. To make up for this frailty, Ducky does more damage than Slipstream. Oh and Ducky is clearly smaller than any other vessel the player can select. Everything combines to make it feel unique, even if there are similar ships.
CHARGE SHOT
But the game already has a charge shot. Wait 1/4th of a second and you get a triple shot, which is helpful for taking out faster enemies or hard to reach places. Oh but then if you wait five seconds, you get a second charge shot with a powerful projectile that does twice the damage and it pierces through enemies, but does less damage the longer it passes through enemies. It is basic, but easy to use. The ships with stronger attacks take longer to charge. One of the new pilots reduces the time it takes to charge a shot.
3 VARIANTS TO THE LAUNCHER BOSS
The launcher boss drops mines... but now, the further you go in the game, the more variety you'll see. It will also drop rammers and then replace its launcher with a giant laser. The laser is easier to dodge if you have a ship with dash, since the dash let's you go through even a fat laser with no damage to the ship. With that said, I'm lucky to make it past the third boss, let alone to make it to the fourth and then sixth.
COINS ARE VALUABLE
The coins now accumulate when you collect them. At a game over, you're given a bonus coin for each 1,000 points. So 450,000 points translates into 450 extra coins. It feels easy enough to get 500 - 1,000 coins in a single run between collecting them and bonuses. At the moment, there is nothing to do with the coins, but in the future they will be used to unlock pilots and ships.
2 MORE WEAPON PICKUPS
In addition to dual and tri shot, there's now triple and big shot. The big shot doubles the size of a bullet along with its damage while the triple shot fires three projectiles forward rather than in a triangle pattern. It should be noted that the collectables that get dropped from enemies have been broken into three categories, health, wealth, and weapons. Health contains shields, health and lives. Wealth contains projectile to coin, 1,000 point pickups and magnets. Weapons have all four of the weapons and the bomb. This category system is used for the new pilots. Extra lives happen more frequent in easier difficulties.
COUNTDOWN CLOCK
The clock starts at three minutes. For each level completed, a minute or more is added to the clock with a maximum of five minutes. On the easiest difficulty, players are granted more time, where running low is never an issue. The clock was added, because otherwise the player can dash wipe bullets through the entire game to rack up points without getting out of the first level or two. If the clock runs out, the living players lose a ship, but get an extra sixty seconds added to the clock.
SLOWER ENEMY PROJECTILES
With everyone I know playing a gentler shmup, I took the easy mode of Cloud Cover to a slower route. Enemy projectiles now move at half speed, at least for the first 10 or so levels. While this might seem like a good way to dodge bullets, this also means the player has more projectiles on screen for longer periods. The basic enemy that appears 97% of the time is also slower.
LEVELS FOLLOWED BY BOSSES
At the end of each level is now a boss, except for the first level. Bosses now have a level rather than the boss being the level. This should extend the game a bit while making the player more motivated to not run out of time. The enemy appearances have been tweaked so the player will see all the enemies in 9 levels rather than 11. Everything may still be tweaked, but the bosses were given levels as it was tough to justify a mini boss followed by a bigger boss with no level between.
MINI BOSSES
The mini bosses are all the same foe for the moment, but with each battle, the mini boss becomes more difficult. It goes from a forward shooting foe, to twisting and turning as it shoots. Then in later levels it gets two hyper lasers and later on even later levels, it will twist and turn the hyper lasers.
THE BAKER BOSS
With the game getting easier with the slower projectiles, there's now enough need for a fourth boss. The baker has a face, a shooting hat, fires toast and blocks with its arms. If you shoot the toast, it explodes into bullets. If you destroy the baker's arms, guns will come out. The objective is to disable the hat gun, followed by annihilating the face. The baker can be found at the end of level 12. Bosses and mini bosses now give a single health drop on their defeat.
SMASHERS
The smashers are a new collectable that spawns twin objects to smash into enemies. The objects also work as a shield as they will wipe projectiles. When shooting, the smashers keep a close distance to the player, but when not shooting, they extend out further and rotate faster to turn into a new and unique weapon. Like with the other weapons in the game, there is a time limit that starts at 10 seconds.