All the tweaks in the world...
January 26, 2106 - Little Rock, AR
Last night I spent couple hours reworking the Phase Defense reaction. The Phase Defense was developed by the Teratrons as a way to protect themselves against the human attacker (you!).
They place these machines in their ranks, and make it so that they can inhibit your progress until they pretty much force you to set one off.
Beware though, when you do, they get phase shifted, and can no longer be hit by your light bombs, for about 10s. If you fire a bomb toward them, it will simply go through them to the next un-phasedTeratron and move themselves down in the rank toward an attack.
While this seems solely a defensive measure, the wise pilot can find ways to take advantage of this moment to set up chains behind the whacked out aliens.
Oh, and if two phase engines are within reach of each other, they will start a chain, causing even more of the pesky TFOS to shift out of play. But, it's not quite right yet...
...and that brings us to tweaks.
Timing is everything in this game. So we've got a lot of work to do on getting it just right. It seems that we've completed a LARGE portion of the primary work to be done in this game, and now we have to try and balance it, here is a list of just a few of the many variables we've set up to allow us to tweak:
- Advance time - The amount of time between successive new TFOS showing up on the grid
- Advance Time CoEfficient - A multiplier to adjust the advance time over time. Smaller than 1 will make it faster, greater than 1 makes it slower.
- Grid Size and Starting Rows - These settings allow us to change the number of rows and columns in the grids, and well as how many are at the beginning of a stage, and how they fill the screen.
- Special Spawn rates - a fractional chance of the system creating a special item during an advance. The current special spawns are:
- The White Ship
- The Special Weapon Bonus
- The Time-Warper
- The Phase Shifter
- The Special Weapon Fill Rate/Max - What's needed to fill a Bank Charge
- The Special Weapon Bank - The max number of charges you can have ready
Of course there are many other tweaks to make, such as the length of certain animations and timers, then number of extra lives you start with as well as your chances of earning additional 1UPs.
So, there's still a lot of work to be done, and we're working every day and night to get you this game. We're almost certain you're going to love the final product.
Test Downloads available for your Android device
Play.google.com
*NOTE - WE do have an Apple Account, but are working toward a more stable release before testing in the Apple Store. We hope to start that process in February.
Stay Frosty,
~Sub-Zero Chuck
