Polarity switch mechanic!

One step back, two steps forward...

This week I started on the Arcade mode of VR Vaders... I wanted to introduce waves of dodging bullets. In order to achieve this, I realised I would need a mechanic to force the player to get close to the bullets, as in a roomscale game its quite tricky to fill the whole room with bullets! So I've gone back to basics and added a polarity switch mechanic to the game, similar to how Ikaruga works.

Polarity switching...

You can now switch your ship between Green and Blue form by pressing your trigger button. Whilst in green form, you can absorb green bullets without damage. You also fire a green laser, which can kill everything apart from green enemies. Whilst in blue form, you absorb blue bullets, and can kill all but blue enemies.

Gun charge meters...

I've also added the new gun to the ship with a couple of meters that go from empty to full. Screenshot 1 you can see the gun barrel empty, as you absorb bullets, the gun barrel will fill up as in screenshot 2. Once full, it will detonate a nuke destroying everything near by.

Currently this barrel also doubles as your health bar, if a bullet of the opposite colour hits you, you will lose half a barrel of charge, if you have less than half already, you will die!

In addition to the gun barrel, the capsule at the top of the gun acts as a timer to stop you from staying in one form for the whole game. The capsule will steadily decrease over 32 beats of the game, then will automatically switch form when it is depleted. Whilst a form is not use, it's capsule will increase ready to be used once you switch.

Future plans...

Now that I've got a mechanic that I can use, I plan to build boss waves into the Arcade mode, where the boss can only be defeated by filling up the barrel and nuking the boss. This will mean I can design some levels forcing you to absorb bullets whilst dodging the opposite colour, in order to defeat the boss!