More Danger, More Enemies, More Awesome! news

Greetings!

The development of Story of a Cube is progressing slowly but surely.
Recently I've been working mostly with level design, but also a few fun things that I'd like to share with you.
Here we go!

Obstacles!

There used to be a time when Story of a Cube only had AI enemies. That time is over.
Now there's lots of other stuff that can kill you, including rotating spikes, walls trying to mash you and other nice things. :D

Programming something like this isn't difficult at all, but it causes a few problems when it comes to design.
The thing is, fighting enemies and getting past obstacles are very different things. If you're faced with five enemies, maybe you manage to kill four of them, after which you get killed by the fifth one.
After that, you'll respawn, and this time there's only one enemy left. No problem at all.
But non-AI obstacles don't work the same way. If you're faced with five obstacles, get past four of them and die on the fifth one, you'll still have to go through all five once you've respawned.
This makes it difficult to balance the difficulty on levels featuring both enemies and obstacles, as obstacles are generally harder to get past and can kill you several times in a row.

Solving this problem is simply a matter of tweaking the difficulty of the obstacles until it's perfect. Maybe they'll kill you once or twice, but they should certainly not make you run out of lives entirely.
For example, the difficulty of the rotating spikes can be determined by how fast they rotate. I've found that 130 degrees per seconds seems to work the best.

Now this is a bit too hard...

MOAR BULLETS!

Another fun thing I've added is multi bullet shooting for the AI. On the more difficult levels, you will face enemies firing up to five bullets at a time.
Although some bosses will be able to fire even more. Good luck :P

Well, that's pretty much it for today. Post a comment if you feel like it, feel free to add Story of a Cube to your game watch, and follow on twitter for quick and funny news, and I'll see you next time.
Bye bye!