Wowie Jam 4.0 is over! Yay?

     It was great working on the jam and reviewing some of the amazing projects that were included in it. If you would like to see some of the other games that were entered into the jam you can see them here. I had a lot of fun working on this game and the next question is... what do I do with it now? Many people have expressed that they were surprised that a story could exist in a small game like this, and I would love to explore that story more. This concept was also one that I've been waiting a long time to try out and I would hate to leave it so soon, There's a lot more that I'd like to explore with this project so you should consider this an announcement that the game isn't done yet. You can look forward to seeing some more announcements about it in the future.  Check on any of my social media channels or my discord server to be updated on what the future of this game looks like.

Post-Jam Build

     Before I begin with the next version of this project there is some housekeeping that I needed to do first. I released an update targeting  some of the major points of feedback that I received during the jam and also adding in a few things that I wasn't able to get to because of my poor planning skills. In almost every comment, I received the following pieces of feedback: 

• The game is too straightforward. You can win with a relatively simple strategy.
• The programming is too complex for its purpose in-game.
• The player is too strong.

   In this first post-jam build of the game,  I targeted the first and last point and added some new features to shake up the game for those who played it on the initial release. The changes are as follows:

• New Sensor Added- Observer
  • The observer makes a turret target whatever the player is looking at. This should allow for a few different playstyles to emerge for those seeking it.
• New Enemies Added- Splitter and Latcher
  • The Splitter is a new enemy that will split into two smaller ones once it dies.
  • The Latcher is a new enemy that will attach itself to a turret or the base once it is in range, making it fly towards its target very quickly and negating knockback.
• Enemy balance changes
  • Overall many of the enemies are stronger and faster,  making the game much more challenging than the jam version.
• Weapon cooldown added.
  • Currently, the ray gun fires at a rate of 4 shots per second. I wanted to let players focus more on turret construction rather than having good aim.
• Jet speed adjusted
  • Previously the speed of the jets was framerate dependent. Now microbots with jets move much faster and have an actual impact on the variety of the game.
• Hyper Shot adjusted.
• Decreased the cooldown and cost to give this weapon an edge without making it extremely overpowered.

Changes to the turret programming are also coming but these are going to be more drastic and would require more work than what would be appropriate for a post-jam update. Finally, I'm going to be trying to upload a WebGL build and a general performance update soon to let more people play the game who aren't able to at the moment.

Thanks!

I'm happy that people had fun playing with this little project and I'm excited to see what the future holds. If you reached all the way down here you must really rock with me or something. Stay hydrated, stay safe, and talk to you soon!

~Trabasura