I played around a bit with my space combat demo the other day and found that it was actually a lot more fun than I had remembered.  Trying to shoot at the enemy isn’t very exciting, but just flying around can be quite entertaining. I’ve been trying to think a little more about ways to make the game more fun and realy take advantage of the good parts of the game.

What is fun:

• Weaving in and out of enemy projectiles
• The smoothly zooming camera system

Not so much fun:

• Repeatedly shooting at an enemy while it sits there and shoots you
• Losing the sense of speed (mainly happens when there are no planets within your field of view)

Here’s what I think might be fun

• Change from 1v1 duels to having lots of small enemies trying to stop you as you race towards some goal
• Have asteroids or some other obstacles frequently in your way to give both a better sense of speed and more difficulty
• Have periodic 1v1 boss fights that require you to target the boss’ weak points and recognize its attack pattern

I’m not entirely sure how these fit together, but it could make sense if the idea is that you are making some last ditch effort to break through some enemy defenses to reach their main capitol ship. I’m mainly worried about the programming aspects of implementing these ideas — the primary reason I wanted to make a space game was to be able to avoid complicated things like collision detection and fancy AI!

So I’m not sure how this will work out, but the ideas have inspired me to start working on the code which otherwise had been abandoned for about 6 months…