This time we want to bring you behind the scenes – right into our development process: our thoughts, explorations and what we are currently working on to bring StarBoost onto the finish line.
Ready to wear the game dev hat?
Current Development State and Updates
After the release of the Demo, we are now working on extending the core game mechanics that are already playable in the Demo.
One big feature we are still discussing and conceptualising to refine the idea of it is the Exploration Game Mode. That mode is a different beast compared to the main racing modes: you can freely fly around the maps and discover story elements and have various ways of solving little interactions / puzzles to unlock hidden racetracks and segments in the main modes. These are meant to give more variety on the track, increase replayability and also empower the player to be faster and achieve better scores.
The free roaming aspect brings it’s own difficulties of course and we are building out little prototypes to test out what works best.
Fighting Behaviour – behind the scenes
Another construction site of current development is fighting…
We are working on different enemy types, more weapons, better integration with powerups and the overall feel of fighting in the game. It is not the main aspect of StarBoost, but important nonetheless and should feel good, enjoyable and dynamic. To test that out and see what works and what doesn’t we are working in prototype environments (minimal to no dress up) to not distract from the feature we are testing. These testing environments have a special kind of setup that enables us to laser focus on the mechanics and isolate the behaviour.
In this map it’s all about testing enemy formations. This is a new kind of enemy setup that has a leader who can shoot either regular laser or rockets that autonomously target the player. Convoying the leader are little Flockers that either form an aggressive fighting formation or tail the leader when hunting the player.
In this form it’s not planned to happen during the regular racing but great to test the feature for limits and balance points.
Speaking of “regular”: another aspect we are finetuning and extending are Racing Events. Those can be unlocked in the solo mode by challenges. When active they highlight a specific aspect of the game and challenge the player: Expert Race Events, Battle Events, Ultimate Point Collection Events and so on.
These are then transforming the race so the playing experience has a different taste to it and can boost the progression of the player.
There are more updates to talk about but to keep this somewhat reasonable to read we will talk about those later.
To be continued
More soon!
Don’t forget you can help us greatly by wishlisting the game on steam
Thanks for your time and we hope you’ll be back for the next devlog,
your StarBoost Team
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