Update! (Invaders From Space release + Ninja Attack progress) (Patreon)

So 'Invaders... From Space!' came out! There's good news and there's bad news.

The good news is that it seems most people who played the game enjoyed it. As I write this, the game's ratings show 3.5/5 stars on the iStore, with mostly praises to how the game looks and to the originality of the base mechanic. The game was actually recommended by Apple in the iStore section "New Games We Love" in a total of 153 countries (!!!), which feels pretty overwhelming.

And yet. And yet Faisal from The Frosty Pop Corps tells me that it looks like most player don't seem to play the game, or at least not for long. There's a pretty good number of installs but the ad revenue just doesn't match up. Faisal told me that it was a pretty bad week for a release, with a bunch of bigger brand releases on the same week. But appart from that, and as a few players and reviewers pointed out...

The game is shallow. It looks great, it plays great, but there just isn't much to it. You play 3 games and you've seen pretty much all the game has to offer. From there you can just continue to enjoy the same game (and I think it is enjoyable even on larger periods of time), maybe try to top off the leaderboards, or leave the game and go get some achievements on the next app. After all, the game was made in just one month, by just one person (me) but it's also possible that I didn't really get my priorities right.

This is the conclusion I am led to draw and this is why with Faisal we decided to try and make the next game more appealing to the mobile audience. Even though there was already a pretty solid track for a progression system, (which is dearly missing from Invaders) we're just gonna go deeper in that direction.

That progression system I had already thought out was to unlock 'styles', which would translate a new texture in the style the game used to have. But actually I decided to change the style of the game, to make it more colorful. And so now, unlockable 'styles' will be a texture with a duo of colors. (see gif) You'll be able to unlock those styles through a very basic shop with points won in the game.

Aside from that, I'm also going to try and think up a simple procedural quest/achievement system.

Oh and I overhauled the control system. With the previous one you had to swipe around to do things (rotate and shoot surikens) and it felt pretty good, but with the new design, you get buttons and you can understand how the controls work just by looking at the screen, which I decided was better. (see gif)

For now, I'm still only getting started on the gameplay, (because of the style and controls overhauls) so it's still a long shot. But I think it'll be good!

Thanks for reading! I'll do another update about just the ninja game at some point soon-ish!

Take care!

TRASEVOL_DOG