This week has been less productive than I would have liked.  In many ways unrelated to game dev, life has decided to kick me in the nuts.  As a result, I really haven't been able to get much done.

FORTUNATELY the same can't be said for ref's art!

Art

While I've been doing whatever it was that I did, ref has been creating a terrifying/beautiful last level.  I asked him to go as big as he could possibly go for the land and art masses and he sure delivered.  

It's hard to get a good sense of scale but terrain is LARGE.  He has been making an incredible alien and hostile landscape.  Hot dog this might be his craziest work.

Outside of this, he has also added some enemies to this environment which he did in one try! No refs or anything, just put them out and I'm happy with the result.  I can't wait to show these monsters off in game.

Programming

Outside of artwork, I've tried to get time where I could, but like I said it's been a rough week.  The main thing I've decided is to reevaluate what is most important from the feedback I received.  I think that moving forward the most important thing for the game is to include some more B loops to increase replayability.  I think that all the events I've been adding to the game are not quite the same thing.  

I realized what's important to this game is that each run has it's own "build" or unique elements.  The events, although unique will generally appear if you play long enough.  However I need something that becomes unique based on the player's choices.  

To fix this I'm adding one more system to the game.  It's a sort of evolution system that lets you get new powerups based on how you combine them.  I'm still experimenting with it, hence how cryptic this reads, but I think once I nail it down, it's what will truly differentiate one run from another!

Next week

This week I'm going to try my best to find more time and complete this system.  From the development side I feel blocked, as if I'm not quite sure what's the most important thing to do.  Unfortunately the only way to know is by experimenting so I need to go back to the fire and see what I can produce.  Hopefully this system will show me the way forward.