A New Game

I changed a lot of things.
It took way longer than I planned but that's life.

First I updated the main menu. As you can see it was very cluttered, probably very overwhelming for the player. With lots of buttons and without enough descriptions, it was probably a good example of what not to do when it comes to UI/UX design.

I removed all the levels, upgrade related stuff. I put the score on top to emphasize that this is a high score game and also added a bigger leaderboard button. So the game now is a truly arcade game where players compete for the highest score and write names in a public leaderboard. If I see another name other than mine, I'll probably be a little surprised. :D I don't think the icons are good enough.

I also spent some time on balancing, I always forget how hard it is to balance a game. I really like getting lost in the code and while refactoring and improving the code, it is so easy to forget about the main purpose of this project. The main purpose is making a fun game and no game is fun without a good balance.
It is important to be able to quantify the gameplay in a way. For that I created this very basic generator and analyzer.

Even though it is very basic it helped me a lot to understand what is going on in the game. Before that I was just playing the game without an aim.

I think the upgrade system was a nightmare. The player had to unlock the secondary weapons before using and the selection for secondary weapons was in the main menu. I removed this part.

Instead, I added an in-game panel and forced the player to choose a random upgrade without any big distraction. At least that's the idea.

It is not perfect but the new way of upgrading feels much better. I think it is less distracting and it does not break the flow. There is a lot to improve when it comes to the visuals and descriptions. I even don't like the names for the upgrades which I loved 6 years ago when I first made this game.

There are some improvements in the controls as well. All of the features are now controllable with only the mouse. Left click fixes the rotation, right click activates timewarp and double click activates bullet nova. I can imagine people playing this game with one hand, on a hot summer day, bored but have nothing better to do, just like me when I was a teenager.

Most importantly, I had a lot of fun working on this and learnt some new stuff too. I want to focus on another hobby project now.