Hello! I thought I’d talk about the ZOE power up system for a bit, if you’re interested.

After the previous ZOE update I knew it still wasn’t really feeling quite right - there were a bunch of smaller things that needed fixing, like the player hit feedback (which was non-existent back then) and a few other bits and pieces, but main thing was the massive POWER UP shaped hole in the game that needed to be filled.

The first thing I did was to make some powered up bullets for Zoe to blast. The standard shot from previous versions became the first level up, so I had to give her a bit of a puny pea shooter to start the level off with. Then came the bigger and more powerful, but slightly sluggish, bullet of the 2nd level up, followed by the (possibly OP?) trio of super fast shots for the final level.

Here are some numbers, stat fans! The speed is the number of pixels the bullet travels per frame, and the fire rate is the number of frames between each shot, so the higher the number the slower the rate of fire…

I’m sure I’ll end up tweaking these numbers as development progresses to balance with the new levels and enemies etc.

The plan was always to have the power ups spawning from the chains of enemies that appear throughout the level, so I got to work on some variations for the paths that the brush draws, both in terms of visual variety and the difficulty they present to the player.

The speeds and amount of chain enemies also change from path to path to mix up the difficulty, and I tried to make the first one pretty easy so you don’t miss the first power up. I also want to add other ways for the brush to trigger the power ups, but I’ve not come up with anything yet.

For the power ups themselves, we have the aforementioned gun levels, the shield (3 orbs that spin around Zoe, giving you 3 free hits), and the points bonus (1000 x current multiplier!). They appear in a set order throughout the level, but if you’re already fully powered up you’ll get a points drop instead of the gun power up. I decided to go for some classic fruit based icons!

The final piece of the puzzle was to make sure the player was actually aware of the opportunity to grab the power up. The brush can appear at random points in the level and potentially out of view of the player, so I tried to combined this with an opportunity to strengthen the whole drawn on film theme of game. When the brush is about to appear, the camera pulls out to reveal the film strip, and the music distorts slightly as well to give you an audio cue. To hopefully ram the message home (I’m still not sure people notice it in the heat of battle!), there’s also the brush indicator that appears next to Zoe, telling you which direction to dash in to get to the brush as quickly as possible.

If you do manage to get to the brush in time you can even deal it some bonus damage that will carry over to the final boss fight!

I’m sure things will keep changing as I keep making new stuff, but I think these changes and additions have really helped the game and made it feel much more shmuppy.

Cheers!
Graeme