Hey all, here’s our week 2 production update for Race The Sun, Introduced last week
[Skip ahead to week 3]
First – here’s a concept Forest put together for a player ship – what do you think?
This week we decided to try a different basic gameplay formula: Instead of the sun going down at a constant rate, it goes down a bit between stages, and the speed powerups reverse it a bit. Additionally, your speed increases just a bit each stage.
This makes the game much more intense! I guess you could say it’s closer to something like Temple Run now in terms of gameplay formula, where before it was more like Tiny Wings. Higher stakes, more intensity, more difficult – and we think a lot more fun.
We also spent a few days prototyping some procedural music stuff. We wanted to see if we could come up with a set of loops that would synchronize perfectly with the grid on the ground. Ultimately we decided this didn’t work for us, because the music would have to either continually speed up with no limit, or reset to a slower speed, which takes a lot of the momentum out of the game’s intensity.
Controls:
Left/Right arrows (or mouse, although it’s not particularly tuned)
Up Arrow/Spacebar will activate the blue jump powerups.
© 2012 Flippfly, LLC
Credits: still a bit of temp music from the NoSoapRadio:
NoSoapRadio (DeceasedSuperiorTechnician) / CC BY 3.0
This is actually kind of fun even in the early stages! You should figure out how to place power ups between tight spaces to make them diffacult to get, but perhaps more powerful if you do take the chance. Also the finished version could have some sort of speed modifier that lets you add to your inital speed. You could have a 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x, ranking. Otherwise the early levels get a bit long.
Thanks for the feedback Adam. Yep, powerups in tight spaces is definitely planned
Good to know the early stages are a bit boring.
The beginning stages are fun for me now, but I imagine that after I run through them a number of times they will start to get too slow. I’ll be waiting for the later stages where the ship moves faster and provides more challenge. It’s kind of the same thing with every platformer. The beginning gets played the most and hence gets boring first.