Some times things just don’t work out the way you planned it. With games it is very difficult to know how much fun a new feature will add, you can only guess, imagine, implement and see. Most often you do this in the experimental phase before you write the real game engine (this is called prototyping), but since we’ve worked on this title for more than two years now almost everything from our prototype has been replaced.
The game was progressing, but as the worlds got bigger they started to feel kind of empty and without a purpose. At the same time, Simon felt he had a hard time balancing the game as the main weapon – the G-Blade (a boomerang-like weapon) – was far to powerful, making the process of creating enemies of varying difficulty extremely hard.
So we started experimenting again, and ended up with reworking the weapons system, adding more game elements and take a fresh new look at the overall concept. It was tough and took a lot of discussion, but we have now ended up with something we feel is a great improvement, and that still looks like a doable amount of work. The new weapon system now consists of collecting Spirits of your fallen enemies, which works even better than the G-Blade with our original intent of the game – exploration.
The worlds that Simon is building is bigger than anything I’ve ever seen in a flash game before, and each level is full of pick-ups, power-ups, secrets, hidden areas and alternate paths. With our hero now being a Spirit Catcher, and a few other new concepts – such as the Toll Station – we feel really optimistic about the game.
We still don’t have a release date. It is difficult to set one since both of us are working on this game on our spare time, but this last month we have been working really hard on getting these changes into the game. I hope that we will find the time to post updates here on a more regular basis from now on (but be aware that the reason for not updating probably means that Ripple is keeping us very busy. The game is constantly progressing =).
Cheers
/Tommy Salomonsson