Gameplay was getting too confusing, especially for new users. I've decided that the newest version will have two main gameplay elements removed for simplification: the ship ability and the friendly powerups.
The ship ability was a neat idea, but adding an extra button and more functionality without much explanation only caused frustration. Players that did not know about it had a very large disadvantage, and a surprisingly large amount of people appeared to have overlooked the ability.
Friendly powerups were even more confusing, because the idea of sending something to yourself is not something innate. The initial idea was to use this as a step to team powerups in team battles, but the benefits do not outweigh the cost of using them. It slows down gameplay by having to think about which button sends what, and often players would accidentally send friendly powerups to enemies, inadvertently helping them instead of hurting them.
If you were a fan of these, don't worry, they aren't completely gone. They are still in the code, so if I can get them to add to the game without taking anything away, they could come back.
In terms of friendly power-ups - can't you program it so that it automatically activates on self upon touch? That's how it was set in WH. I can't imagine that it would be that difficult to program that either - but hey, I'm not the programmer. :P
ReplyDeleteThat's what I have been working on so far, but I need more ideas for friendly power ups and I need them to be balanced. For now there aren't any just to keep the game simple, but if I get them to integrate smoothly they should be in eventually.
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