I want to make sure I’m not overwhelming new players with too much information or too many game mechanics at once. I’ve been thinking about ways to introduce new concepts slowly, over the course of several stages or lessons. I knew that one part of that was going to be tutorial popups that appear at different times and on different screens to explain new concepts or move the story along.
I’ve been on vacation for the last couple weeks, so this update took a while.
I added the first special zombies this week. Sprinters move at double speed, and bruisers are slightly slower, but take 3 shots to kill.
This week I got started on the infrastructure for the next big game enhancement… items!
Just a few more updates to the map now that the game persists completion status.
I’ve been working on persisting player progress to the database. Now when a stage is cleared it’s added to a list of ‘cleared stages’ for the logged in player. The map has a different icon for cleared stages.
I’m making good progress on the map screen. It still needs work, but the basic flow is there. Now the player can choose a lesson, choose a stage, and then go to the practice screen or straight into the game. And the player can also press ‘Esc’ at any time to go back to the previous step.
Now that I can store more than 1 level I need to add a way to choose between those levels. I’m adding a map screen to take care of that. The map screen is broken up into several sections. It’s a work in progress, but I’m happy with how it’s coming along.
It’s been a very busy week. For the demo I only have 1 level and the vocab data is stored in a single hard-coded json file. I want to separate the data from the code before I start adding any more levels. I’ve looked into a few solutions for this and I’ve decided to go with Google Firebase.
I’ve put in some more work on the vocab study screen.
