Hello! Kieran here, we thought it might be cool if we kept our newsbox slightly more updated, so we’re going to be posting some development updates to the main new game we’re working on, Fix Fix Bang Bang. Most recently we’ve been working on hammering it into shape for an Alpha release.
We’ve realised that for gameplay reasons it’s important to be able to see which way the ship on the left hand side of the screen is moving, left or right. To make it more obvious, Pete produced a new ship graphic with space on either side of it, and a thruster animation to go with it. I changed the ship graphics to the new ones and added the thruster animations. It’s hard to put my finger on why, but I’m really pleased with how they came out – they look great on screen.
Another change we made was to improve the tracking of one of the enemy types, the Infester Orb. The orb homes in on the player’s ship, and needs to be shot down or avoided. It turned out the only adjustment we needed to make to get the feel right was to only allow the pods to track for two seconds before just continuing on whatever trajectory they’re on, but we might review this during balancing. We want them to be tricky, but not impossible.
Here’s a video, demonstrating those new animations and orb tracking!
Finally, for reasons of our own sanity, we changed the key-binding system so you can’t use things like caps-lock and volume-up as game keys. Sorry. 🙂