I have been working on this games: i added an A* pathfinding algorithm similar to the one used in My Little Roguelike; an action queue based on a “game time”, that way different actors have different movement velocity, and actions can have varying “time cost”; and now actors react dynamically to new obstacles in their path.

Evidently, it worked as intended, but it was starting to look too much like Pixel Dungeon and i did not want to end up with a “Pixel Spaceship”, because it would add nothing to the sea of Pixel Dungeon clones out there. And because i find Pixel Dungeon boring.

What i am trying out now is to see if i can turn the player’s position to both a restriction and a necessary strategy to win with a system based on match-3 and puzzle games.

I have divided the cells in three different types, that i call digon, trigon, and tetragon, based on the polygon i plan to use as their icon (circle, triangle, and square, respectively), and gave each one a color:

At each turn, the player can move to each of the cardinal directions and as many cells as she want,s but only on cells of the same type/color. The weapon’s strength increases one point for every cell the player steps on, as show with the counter on the top-left corner, until the maximum is reached. Moreover, although i have not implemented it yet, each cell type charges up one of the three weapon/secondary abilities that the player has; each ability can only be charged with a specific type of cell —digon, trigon, or tetragon—, and, once fully charged, can be triggered in place of firing the main weapon.

As can be seen in the video, you trace a path with the finger from the player to whatever cell you wan to reach, and can fire by moving next to a target and tapping on its direction. Once you left a cell, it changes color. Currently it changes to a random color, but looks like it needs to have a bias in favor to the player or the enemy, depending on how well the run is going.

For now i use the four cardinal directions to trace the path, but i might change it to add diagonals too, because more than once i felt that i was too limited otherwise.

The rationale within the story is that the color, that is merely a visualization of your suit’s sensors, represent the type of energy concentrated on that cell, and the abilities are weapons that can “absorb” such energy. I do not have a rationale as to why you can move only over cell of the same color; maybe it needs none—who knows.

To make it more comfortable with mobile, i had to increase the scale to eight, increasing the cell size to 128 × 128 pixels. With a larger size, and much major importance on the position, i think that now there needs to be lees exploration and the game should center much more on combat. I believe that makes sense given how the levels are spaceships: they are more space-conscious, and they would not have large corridors to explore.

At this size, however, i do not like that much the pixel art style, and i think that i need to replace it with vectorial graphics such as this one:

What a drag….