As of 10:00 PM (EST) last night, the game officially entered in-house beta! This means that the gameplay/mechanics are more or less fully developed (save for a few minor tweaks and balance) and I am now focusing almost entirely on polishing/creating Art and Audio for the next week before the game's update/release.
I am extremely pleased with the current gameplay. It is very skill/twitch/reflex based and it is super difficult to achieve a gold medal on all but the first level. Just last night I spent upwards of an hour and a half attempting to get a gold medal on the second level and, as of this posting, I have yet to do so. And I enjoyed every minute of it.
Now, to some people, that might sound like the game is simply to hard, or not properly balanced. I would disagree, the game is difficult without being frustrating or unfair. There is a very simple set of rules and the player is only every capable of performing one of two actions: turn left or turn right (relative to your current position). You crash into an obstacle? You lose. Run over a human? You lose. Go off screen? You lose. Run over a zombie? You score points, boost your combo meter, and your speed increases. That's it. One life to make a high score, earn a medal, and hopefully unlock the next level.
Every action (menu navigation and gameplay) is controlled by swiping up, down, left, or right. You use up and down to navigate the menus, right to accept or select something, and left to go back. When controlling the car, if you were traveling "up" you would swipe left or right to turn left or right. If you were traveling "right" you would swipe down or up to turn left or right. Basically, you swipe anywhere on the screen in the direction you want to be going. In testing, this control scheme worked really well with with high speed, reflex based, gameplay (when compared to buttons, tapping, or a joystick).
If you read some of the earlier posts, you will find mention of a planned "Upgrade Shop" and potential power-ups/pick-ups that I had been thinking about including in the game. Well, I'm not thinking about it any more, they're not in the game.
As stated above, I really like the gameplay the way it is. The shop, in early trials, proved antithetical to the gameplay as it is currently. The game became far too easy when you could buy extra lives, higher starting combo, decreased speed-up amount, etc. When I had two plus lives, it became insanely easy to score a gold medal on all of the levels. So I scrapped the shop (and pick-ups) to preserve the skill-dependent, challenging, gameplay.
And yes, as stated above, my current goal is to have the update shipped off to Apple for approval on or by Friday the 10th. It's going to be a busy week!
-Cody
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