Weekly Dev Journal 4: Sun Flare!



Hey everyone, we’ve got lots of exciting changes this week for Race The Sun!


Local Highscore

Try to get into the 200k range 🙂


Clouds:

This week, we added clouds as a visual and gameplay element, introduced in the third stage if you make it that far. The sun going down arbitrarily between rounds felt a little off to us, and so these clouds add a “reason” for the sun to go down, and a unique type of gameplay obstacle at the same time.

Basically if a cloud comes between you and the sun, your ship slows down, and the sun starts getting ahead of you a bit.

It does add a bit more complexity and tension to the experience because you have to avoid these huge objects in the sky while also looking out for the immediate obstacles. We like the tension it adds, but we might end up making them only happen every couple stages or so so it’s not quite so overwhelming, and then put other types of slow-down mechanics in there.

Pro tip: Make use of the jump powerups!

New Visuals
There are new models for the powerups, an explosion effect (work-in-progress) and a new building in here to replace my temp art – Forest has been working on over a dozen building types, so this is just the beginning. The plan is to choose from a pool of visual styles each day, so each day you play the game it’ll look just a little different.

Play it!
Controls: Left/Right arrows, Up arrow to activate jump powerup.

[WP_UnityObject src=”https://dl.dropbox.com/u/41564278/RaceTheSunPublicDev/Week4/Week4.unity3d” width=800 height=600/]

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