Matt Glanville

Switch ‘N’ Shoot dev blog (v0.9.0)

Yesterday, I made a big breakthrough in the design of Switch ‘N’ Shoot. It was one of those “Eureka” moments that clever people talk about. I haven’t really done any proper blog posts about the game, so perhaps the very existence of this one will indicate how excited I got about it.

Before I go into details, if you haven’t played Switch ‘N’ Shoot yet I invite you to download a pre-alpha build for FREE: right here on itch.io.

It’s a quick-fire, one-button shmup with a crunchy, retro style.

If you have played it and you liked it, I’d really appreciate a little bump up on Steam Greenlight so that hopefully I can share it with many more people! :)

Anyway, I’d been bashing my head against the game for some time. I knew the one-button core mechanic was strong, and it was feeling nice and crunchy, but the secondary mechanics weren’t really gelling as nicely.

1.  I had enemies who were spawning in. The more you kill the faster they spawned.

2. After killing 50 enemies you zoomed ahead to the ‘next wave’ of enemies and the spawn rate drops back a bit.

3. I also had a powerup system that dropped in powerups periodically. If you catch them in succession you can stack up your powerups and get stronger and stronger. But as soon as you miss one you drop back down to the basic weapon. When you exceeded the top-tier weapon you got a free ‘screen clear’ (all on-screen enemies get killed instantly) and you reset back to the basic weapon.

Now the main problem I was having was that your powerups could get horribly out of sync with your enemy wave progression. You could use your top-tier weapon and then reset to the basic one just when you needed it the most - at the peak of an enemy wave - and there was really no opportunity to recover from that.

SO the changes I made yesterday, which resolve all this, is that the enemy wave progression is no longer tied to killing 50 enemies. It is triggered when you max out your powerups instead. It feels awesome. You get the screen clear, you zoom ahead to the next wave, and the enemy frequency drops back down at the exact same moment your powerups do. Now they’re totally in sync, and you get this nice breather moment where you can prepare for the next wave.

Another smaller change I made is that you power-down when you miss a powerup token, which means you can continue to climb your way back up to the top tier. The enemy frequency will still be climbing though, so there’s an incentive to collect every powerup.

I can’t believe what a huge positive impact this relatively simple change has had on the game. It brings all of its core systems together into harmony and provides some awesome feedback loops for the player.

I owe thanks to my friend Martin and the awesome folk on the TIGForums who have given great feedback. Some of these developments came directly from them.

So I’d estimate the game is about 70% complete at this stage. The main gameplay is pretty much done but I’d like to add some more features surrounding it like extra ships and enemies.

You can follow @crowbarska on Twitter for updates as they happen, and try out the game for yourself, free on itch.io!

I hope you like Switch ‘N’ Shoot! :)