Today I released the first playable version of Swarming: Eradication. It’s just a small game that started out as a one-month OneGameAMonth game, which I decided to continue developing because it turned out to be a really fun project to work on. The gameplay and aesthetic of the game is really simple, but the AI makes it fairly challenging and fun to play.
I’ve gone over the basics of how to play in the game description. Here I’d like to talk about the things I plan on changing and improving on later. All of these features are planned, but most have not been started yet, and I am not going to speculate on when they will happen. It all depends on how my available time and motivation hold up.
Upcoming Features:
- The ability to choose your color. This isn’t a big deal, but I still think it will be a nice thing to have.
- Mouse controlled menu. It’s a really bad design decision to have a keyboard controlled main menu in a game that is entirely mouse controlled. The only reason I went with a keyboard controlled menu for the first release was because it was quick to implement.
- The ability to select the number of opponents for the match. I will likely cap it at 3 or 5 opponents, depending on how the game performs.
- The ability to choose the number of planets in the match. The current matches have 30 planets. I’d like to allow matches to have up to 100 planets at least. I don’t want the matches to get too big because it will become increasingly difficult to keep track of what is happening without a minimap. And I really don’t want to implement a minimap.
- Improved feedback for unit selection and moving. Right now when you are dragging units from one planet to another it can be difficult to tell if your cursor is touching the planet, especially when the planet is small and covered with a swarm of enemies. I would like to add some way of indicating that you are about to send units to the planet, and maybe even have some destination indicators for the units.
- More sound effects. This one is in the same category as the previous bullet point. While I don’t plan on adding any sound effects for space battles (there’s no sound in space :P), I would like some sound effects for planet captures and losses, as well as warning sirens for impending attacks.
Improvements:
- It gets really difficult to see the capture progress late-game when the swarms are big enough to entirely block out smaller planets. I will need to add some kind of indicator to fix this.
- When rendering ships that are orbiting the planet I do them a color at a time, which means that all ships of one color will always render above or below the ships of other colors. This is ugly, and it also makes it difficult to judge the size of the fleets under the top color. I want to mix them up a bit when rendering to make it easier to tell fleet sizes, and also to make it more aesthetically pleasing.
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*This is everything I have planned so far. There might be things that I have forgotten, and I’m sure there will be things that I will come up with later. I’m also interested in any ideas you have, so I encourage you to leave any ideas or feedback in a comment.
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