Archerfire 0.40 released

This is a MAJOR release from last one 🙂 PLAY ONLINE

It’s been almost a year, last one was August 15 2013… thousands of things have happened.

What can I say, I decided to shoot to finish it and made some hard choices in order to take it into the shipability route. It’s a completely different game!

Here’s a gameplay vid:

I have stripped a lot of functionality that was either incomplete or burdened the user experience, say goodbye to:

• Custom Player Creation – Was overly complex and offered little return for the player
• Weapon and Pilot Selection – Now they are tied to the ships, so you can jump quicker into the game.
• Wingmen – This was unfortunately not polished enough, it might go back into the game soon.
• Difficulty level selection – To streamline the game and make it easier to balance (balancing 5 difficulty levels was not fun and was a nuisance for players as well)
• Missions Mode – Was incomplete, buggy, unbalanced and unfun.
• Items Shop and consumable powerups and Batteries – They were not really useful in-game, plus I don’t like them as a monetization model.
• Experience Points: Not useful
• And many more other things

I also added two new tracks for the Title and GameOver screens, and changed resolution to 800×480 (was 900×650)

Additionally I debugged and reworked critical portions of the code

• Enemy AI modules
• Enemy spawning structures
• Sound Management

Ship purchases are currently broken since facebook seems to have completely changed how that works since it was functional last year; that might require a fair bit of work to get up and running again.

Pending tweaks:

• Less N00b enemies, more smart ships
• Increase rate for Powerups
• Add intro sequence using big ships, a la Megaman
• Less Big Ships, and change sprite for a small robot
• Make enemies Lean forward and backward when changing altitude
• UFO type ships should lean forward to advance
• Lean forward or backward automatically when climbing or diving into planets
• Make allies smarter
• Bug: Keep music volume when looping and paused!
• Letters don’t look good in bright planetary backgrounds.
• Reduce SWF size (currently 8MB)
• Fix initial values for war status screen