I’m in a weird phase in development. I’m at the point where I could wrap up the space level within a few days, but still feel that the game is lacking critical features and polishing. Also, I have been caught up in other non-game development aspects of life which has prevented me from spending much time on it.

I thought now would be a good time to work on some other smaller feature and improvements. So, I spent some time doing exactly this.

Updated Controls

The controls are okay at best but definitely need some work.

The w and s keys are for pitching up and down but when launching vertically it seems like they should be a and d. But those are used for speeding up and slowing down. Here is my new solution:

Pitch up is now: W, A, ↑, ←

Pitch down is now: S, D, ↓, →

Speed up is now: SHIFT

Speed down is now: CTRL

Auxiliary 1 (Fire gun and rocket staging) is now: SPACE

Auxiliary 2 (Shield) is now: TAB

Of course, there are now new on-screen controls. Instead of being this weird arrow thing they will now be simple buttons representing what the corresponding keys do.

While I was at it, I also polished the in-flight HUD. I moved the score display to the upper right to prevent collision with the heart display.

Scoring System Rework

Currently score is calculated the same for all levels.

Score = 1/10 * Time + Max Altitude + ½ * Distance Traveled

This works for the first 3 stages but it falls apart of the space stage. Firstly, max altitude simply doesn’t exist in space. Secondly, distance traveled doesn’t account for virtual speed in space. Scoring is used to calculate the money received at the end of a level, so this needs to be fixed.

Here is my solution:

Each level will have its own separate score equation like the one shown above.

I can award any number of points per any of these statistics:

• Flight time
• Max altitude
• Distance traveled
• Path distance
• Max speed
• Number of obstacles cleared
• Hit the ground safely (no fail)
• Bonus

Sub-levels such as the rocket launch and moon landing can have certain statistics not be recorded. A space level won’t record altitude because that doesn’t really make sense in space.

Making the Nest More Intuitive

Another thing I did was polish make the colors of the upgrade points change color depending on whether you can afford them. Red you can’t afford, green you can, and gold you have maxed out.

This isn’t everything I’ve worked on, but most of the things I can’t show or aren’t interesting/noteworthy enough. I’m trying to get back to a more consistent development cycle, but right now I’m out of the loop.

The next thing I’m planning on doing is finishing the space level. I got a lot of cool ideas which I’m sure will get me excited to work on this game more often.