Gloop Troops 2 additions: The bomb

We've been toying with changes to the Gloop Troops formula and in our PC testbed we've recently been experimenting with a bomb pickup.

We wanted a pickup which would reward the player for collecting it and to tie into the main scoring mechanic of trying to keep as many enemies glooped as possible. We did not want a pickup to take away from the score mechanic of chaining enemies or to destroy enemies.

Our plan for the bomb is to have it appear much like the fruit in the first game. It will materialise every few seconds and once it's collected by the player it will cause all enemies on screen to be shaken by an explosion!

As with glooping enemies it will check how many enemies have been glooped when the bomb is detonated and reward the player with a higher points bonus per enemy glooped than you would have earned by just glooping them.

However once all the enemies have finished being shaken by the explosion they will all return active to the game and be invincible for a second! This'll make the player think twice before collecting the bomb, and plan their path through a level more carefully :-)

More Speccy happenings

Lots happening on the Speccy scene recently - the new releases on WoS of Binary created with Jonathan Cauldwell's Arcade game designer

I've not tried the Arcade game designer yet but back in the day I had spent many hours using S.E.U.C.K for the Amiga before learning to program in AMOS.

Work on Gloop Troops continues, we've now got some test data for the speccy so we'll be starting to put the final project structure together over the next few weeks. Hopefully we'll have some demos to download soon :-)

Concept pic + speccy news

With Gloop Troops 2 we're planning on having a bonus stage that is accessed when a level has been completed and the player has performed brilliantly.

The level has Pokey, or Peeky, running around trying to collect as many hearts as possible before time runs out. To make life harder for our intrepid heroes there'll either be a Squidgy or another enemy at the bottom of the screen throwing bombs upwards to try and catch our heroes out.

If the player gets hit by a bomb they'll lose 5 seconds off the clock and when the timer hits 0 they'll be sent to the next proper level. Hopefully this should give the game a nice amount of variety :-)

Also in Speccy news the Mojon Twins have released yet another game! More info on it can be found on The WoS forums

Work in progress - Gloop Troops 2

Here's a in-development screen shot of Gloop Troops 2! This is taken from our PC version test bed which we'd created so we can rapidly test out new gameplay ideas. In the screen shot above we have one of our new enemy designs being tested out, patrolling platforms above Pokey. The HUD also has had a lick of paint to help keep everything on screen fresh. Pokey too has been given a suit of armour to help defend him on his quest! All work in progress at the moment so don't take anything as being set in stone :-)