Falling Stars is in Alpha?
Yes. It is a simple project, going forward it will be a game of refining what it currently is and improving the UI/UX along with visuals/VFX. As far as I am concerned, the mechanical phase is effectively complete. Some of the dynamics need work still, which is the project is in alpha and not in beta or complete.
The current state of Falling Stars
- Developer Graphics
- All the game enemies complete
- Lacking BG elements
- A fun game loop with escalating difficulty from a melancholy, slow start to absolute chaos as the entropy increases.
- Needs a menu screen and a way to “skip up” score for players inclined to jump into the action
- Potentially needs a way to inject special waves (such as a shooting star wave or a UFO wave)
One of the more interested developments happened behind the scenes. A rework of the way entities are spawned was carried out to streamline the game, give a bit less predictability in where entities spawn and allow for a score based difficulty curve.
Multiple spawn fields off screen generate the various objects which fall into the view of the player. Falling stars descend from the top (white), shooting stars streak in from the corners (blue) and UFOs hover in from the sides (violet).
There also is a grey spawner used to generate background elements to give more sense of advancement to the player (and more to look at than just pure black void).
Each spawner has a “star fall” script which acts as a spawn manager.
There are two separate lists utilized, the entity roster and the intensity list.
The entity roster is a prefab roster with probabilities and a minimum score for spawning. A smaller probability means less likelihood to be selected for a given interval. Each spawner has a default prefab assigned to it should it be unable to spawn objects with a score criteria.
The score_intensity list meanwhile is used for increasing the spawnrates as the player gets more scoring. The score_intensity list is what I believe will take the most rebalancing since the score_intensity script controls both the pacing of gameplay and the difficulty curve the player will encounter.
How complex to go with the wave mechanics is uncertain, I may still be unsatisfied with this approach and attempt to make a wave system that is more scripted and allows for special waves.
However I am mostly confident than the entity roster is good enough variation wise. Maybe I add a couple additional entity types, but for now the current selection is enough for an arcade game experience:
- Falling Stars: These fall down from the top of the screen, they are the most common thing the player encounters. Can be dodged or destroyed for points and a chance to get missile drops.
- UFOs: UFOs are spacecraft which will charge a death ray at timed intervals that needs to be weaved around or with good timing, shot down with a missile/laser. UFOs can drop extra lives.
- Shooting Stars: Shooting Stars are green trailed stars which fall diagonally and rapidly, making them hard to hit.
- Killing Stars: Killing stars are massive, spiky stars which are very tanky but slow descending. They need to be destroyed before they reach the bottom of the screen or the player will lose a life.
- Mothership: Not shown due to how under developed they are, but basically a UFO with a lot more health and does not leave the screen until they are destroyed. They do not appear until the player has over 50000 points and aren’t common.
Interested? Feel free to try out Falling States in its current state on itch.io using this link!
