Keeping with the “old soviet newspaper” theme of Whirlygig…I had the idea that levels should take place within a photo in a newspaper article. I implemented that tonight.

 

When I went to render video my wife was there and said: “Instead of having one heli just sit there while you shoot it why don’t we just play?” Sweet, challenge accepted!

 

So, we flew around and shot at each other. The really good news is that she enjoyed playing a lot! When you work on a game for a long time and playtest constantly to check new features…you lose sight of whether it’s actually fun. It was cool that she (a total non-gamer) and I (a veteran gamer) could battle it out and both have a good time. She got the hang of the controls right away, though her aim was terrible and she never let off the trigger. When I implement minigun overheating…she may not like that.

 

I discovered some glitches that are really annoying but pretty easy to fix:

  • The bullet impact sounds are annoying. They need to be quieter and possibly less frequent. Sound is something that I have a lot to do on anyway. It’s barely implemented.
  • Bullet and rocket contrails are placed right on the projectile instead of slightly behind it. This is a known visual bug I haven’t gotten around to fixing.
  • If a player dies with the trigger down their invisible heli keeps raining brass, the controller vibrates, and the minigun sounds plays. I thought I fixed this once but I must not have.
  • Currently helicopters don’t collide. My wife said she wants to be able to bash them together. Easy to implement but should I?
  • When lots of bullets are flying it’s hard to tell which ones are yours and where you’re shooting. This is partly because the new levels have a lighter background than the way they were originally designed. I need to tweak the trails and maybe make bullets the color of the player that fired them?

So, what do you think: Colored bullets, different colored trails, an aiming laser? Should helis collide? Any other feedback is welcome. Keep in mind that I probably can’t respond to tons of new feature requests and still hit my DBP and release deadlines. But I’ll definitely be considering user reaction to playtest vids for the final release and future feature adds.

Thanks for reading!