In the meantime. Reflex is coming up to it’s 2 anniversary – and so I thought I’d make a few changes.

1. A demo version of the game is now available to download via the Reflex itch.io page. This version allows you to try out the first 16 levels of the game. Progress is continued to the full version if you decide to buy it.
2. The itch.io version has been updated slightly. It’s just a small patch that changes the head start time between sub-levels (levels that contain more than one floor) from 10 seconds to 5 seconds. This is because I felt that the pause was too long. As this is the only change you could keep using the previous build to keep those extra 5 seconds – I won’t tell anyone
3. I’ve decided to lower the price of the game to $2.99. Sales have not been near to what I expected and I’m guessing that people don’t want to pay $5 for a relatively small puzzle game these days. Hopefully sales will pick up as a result.

This process seems to have started. There are new filter features that are only available to certain subscription tiers, and so not available to lifetime users. This is not something I like and so I wanted to see what else was available.

I have tried Unity in the past and didn’t get on with it. For my small games it would be like breaking a nut with a planet sized boulder.

So, I decided to give Godot a try.

At first glance it is extremely different to GM. The coding language is Python based which fills me with dread because of the lack of ‘end if’ and ‘end function’, relying instead on indentation based logic. But I wanted to give it a darn good go.

I opted to sign up for the GDQuest Zero to Hero GDScript course so that I would get a good foundation of the basics before trying something myself. The course is designed for Godot v3.x but they are creating an updated version to cover the new features of v4.

It took about 3 weeks to complete the course and I feel quite confident with Godot now. I have put together a very quick project that replicates the core mechanic from Reflex, and that went very nicely.

I am now working my way through a Godot v4 course on Udemy (Learn Godot 4 by making a 2D Game) while I wait for the GDQuest update.

I have an idea for a new game and I’m hoping to begin a prototype soon.

Anyway, the update available now on Steam, and will be available on Android in the next day or so, has the following changes:

Android – splash screen added. The game will also load much faster now thanks to a change in texture compression.

Pc and Android – multi floor levels will now give the player a 10 second head start before the missile arrives. This will allow players to make quick preparations.

This last one is a big one for my playtester who had been struggling with level 5.23 because it requires you to quickly work out what to do on 4 floors. With a small pause in the action he’ll be able to have a quick look around and try to work out what to do.

I isolated the issue to how long it was taking the game to connect to, and log in to, the Google Play Game Services, which is used for cloud saves, achievements, etc.

I had to make the difficult decision to remove this functionality (it was third party code from YoYoGames, so I had no way of diagnosing the issue completely). So, the Android version has lost cloud saves and achievements.

The good news, however, is that the game is available for installation again.

I believe the cause is due to a hang or incompatibility with Google Play Game Services – that’s responsible for the achievements and the cloud save games.

This aspect of the game was written by YoYoGames and it is a bit clunky. It may be necessary for me to remove this feature from the game. Achievements and save games will remain local to the device rather than being synced. This in effect will be the same as the Amazon Fire version as they do not support cloud saves or server achievements.

I will post an update once I’ve reinstated Reflex for Android.

As you may have seen so far; I’ve been playing around with a procedural map generator, and also some skeletal animation for the main character; both aspects I’m very pleased with.

And so the next stage is guns. Lots and lots of guns. In true Borderlands style I set out the various aspects I would like for each gun. I ended up with:

• 5 gun companies
• 11 gun types (pistol, rifle, etc)
• 9 projectile types (single shot, triple, bouncer, etc)
• 3 barrel types
• 5 scopes
• 5 stocks
• 10 gun levels (Mk1, Mk2, etc)

All of this is generated procedurally to create, well a heck of a lot of guns, more than my calculator would let me work out. At the moment the procedure simply generates and displays the information for each gun one after the other; there’s no sprites assigned so far.

For each variety the gun gets a buff or debuff; so for example one of the companies has increased damage but decreased range on their guns. A decent scope will increase accuracy, and so on. This results in a lot of variation:

With the above examples, you can see some of the variations that the generator can create. In the game the player will be awarded guns randomly from crates and major kills but the level of the gun will be capped depending on how far in the game the player is. I wouldn’t want to give the player a Mk10 pistol right from the start, he would be unstoppable very early on.

Note: Rate of fire is a raw ticks value and is subject to change once I see the guns firing. Accuracy is actually shown as how far the shot could drift from the aim point, so higher is worse. Mind you, saying that, everything is subject to change.

The Android version is identical visually to the Windows version except you play by tapping the game board and dragging the screen around with your finger. The Android version also supports vibrations for when a missile is destroyed (can be turned off); it also supports Google Achievements.

The game can be purchased from the store using the link below:

For full details on the game, visit the Reflex product page.

While I resolve the issue I have unpublished the game from the store. Please bear with me; this is all very new to me and it’s rather complicated to set up.

I’m still waiting on Amazon to publish the game. There aren’t any game services on this version so it should go through without any trouble.