The game design document is coming along nicely. Crunch time has been, gone, and is back again already. We had 5 days off last week, and I took that time to relax and plan my design. I’ve made a few changes to some of my initial ideas, however I think the gameplay will benefit from it.

I’ve changed the missile selection to be a simple 2D grid, rather than a 3D cube as it was going to be too hard to represent it in an easy to use UI. This will allow more focus on the types of missiles to put in the group, rather than fighting against the UI to figure out which square is which. The other change I’ve made is adding fighters to the defence network. I wanted to increase the reason for directing the missiles and having fighter cover to move around is perfect. The fighters only defend the capital ship and fly around it shooting down incoming missiles.

I’m working my way through the design doc and trying to get all of my ideas down on paper, which is helping me to flesh out my ideas. I can highly recommend anyone who has a few game ideas in there head to try and formalise it on paper. Doing this forces you to think about the complex areas of your game you would normally skim over. I’ve also been drawing a few concept sketches of what I imagine the combat will be like, I’ll try scanning or photographing some of them and putting them up here when I get some time.

Other than that, thanks to Damian I know how the warp effect working on all cards other than my own. I was trying to use a non-power of 2 texture which was only working on my 6800. I’m finding it quite challening to keep away from coding, however so far I’ve been quite successful and the game design is getting some depth to it.