Its been a while since I posted so I wanted to give a slightly meatier update on “Icarus”. Let’s start with a short video that represents an early taster of the gameplay. It’s in a very raw form and the visuals are unpolished (to say the least), but it should give you an idea of what to expect from the final game.
Some things to look out for…
- Different enemies require different amounts of sun strength to be destroyed (Controlled by dragging the liquid in the thermometer on the right).
- Enemies are random with no pre-defined speed or position. The rarity of the enemy, speed thresholds and sun strength required to destroy the enemy are not random.
- The screen will dim over time (representing the sun setting). Once the sun has set, its game over! For the purpose of the video I set the time to be very short but in the final game i’ll provide some options.
Obviously I still have a lot of work to do. A glaring example is that currently there is no penalty for just using maximum sun strength on all enemies. I’m planning to hook this up to the sunset timer so that the higher the sun strength you select, the faster the sun sets. Hopefully this will introduce an element of strategy. The graphics are still very early and I expect them to change vastly by the time the game is released.
In other news: Up until now I have developed this game using purely the SDK and iPhone simulator. The time has come to begin trying it out on a real device so today I applied to the iPhone Developer Program. Looking forward to being accepted soonish. I’ll update again soon with some more progress.