Development Blog #3

About the release date of my game

When I first created the game’s webpage, I wasn’t really sure when I would release the final product as I was still pretty early in development. At the time, I thought “sometime in 2024 sounds good to me!” so I put that in as the release time.

Now that I am further along in the development process, I can now say with slightly more confidence that, assuming everything goes well, I will still be able to release this game before this year ends.

However, something always goes wrong in the development process, be it programming difficulties, real-life time conflicts, etc. So, I will be going with the safe option and will be announcing now that I will be releasing Solar War sometime in Q1 2025. (January-March) I hope you understand.

The actual thing that I wanted to talk about today

In Development Blog #1, I had mentioned that I was going to add more solar systems into the game, “each with their own design and gameplay feel!” I believe that now is a good time to be revealing the first of these new solar systems. Let me introduce you to… Alphy Centauri!

(For those who were looking forward to images, sorry, there will be none! I like to let each planet be a mystery, and if I associate a planet’s likeness to its AI, then I will kind of be spoiling the game for newer players. And no, I will not be putting images under spoiler tags! I will only be putting other things under spoiler tags!)

Alphy Centauri is a binary star system with 10 main sequence planets in the system. These planets can spawn moons, though none of them can spawn nearly as many moons as the Sol System can.

(Tidal can spawn 3 moons, as opposed to Saturn’s 6)

Rare events can also hit this system,

which can spawn planets, asteroids, comets, Things, nukes, and even suns!

And, of course, there are 8 bosses that can spawn in.

The thing that really makes this system challenging and fun(?), though, is this: Annoyances (the small gray balls that are really hard to hit and can shoot The Earth) spawn in much greater frequency here, making it much more difficult to effectively recover your HP when you “accidentally” run into one of the bigger objects. A lot of objects in this system are smaller, but there are a few big objects that can really ruin your day.

Note that in harder game modes, annoyances can kill you directly!

Some of the new objects that you can expect to find

I won’t be going over all of them, but I will be going over a few of them.

Caged

This is a planet that you may not want to destroy… because if you do, multiple annoyances will fly out of it, wreaking havoc on your health!

Stats:

• 20 Max health

• NO Recovery

• Can spawn up to 8 annoyances when defeated, with a minimum amount dependent on difficulty

Lente

Lente is a real beast, with 300 max health! It slowly slumbers toward a random location on the screen, and when it does… it fires a Lazer beam