MACH-X
Boss fights are one big target with phases. I wanted a second kind of fight that feels different: a flying fortress you take apart.
That is the gunship raid. There are seven of them, from an armoured airship to an aircraft carrier in the sky. Each one is built from parts. Turrets, engines and guns have their own health. You pick what to knock off first. Shoot the turrets and the barrage thins out. Kill an engine and the whole ship changes how it moves. It is a puzzle you solve at speed.
I built the raids on 17 October. They live in their own mode, so they do not interrupt a normal run. There is a new daily raid, so the target changes every day. Gunship Alley stacks several gunships at once for players who want the screen full. Every gunship you down earns a statue for the Trophy Room and the Memorial Field on your base. I like that a hard fight leaves something behind you can look at.
Gunships got a lot of polish after they went in. A few details from the weeks that followed:
- Raid gunships got a small camera lean (26 October), so the ship feels heavy and close.
- The train in the world levels now blows up car by car instead of vanishing (release 1.6.0).
- The fuel depot was redrawn and shows damage states (release 1.6.0).
- Dug-in flak guns and boats no longer get shoved around by enemy swarms (release 1.7.0).
On 26 October I went through the whole game with a long checklist: performance, accessibility, audio, economy. Boring work. One result: errors in a game loop no longer freeze the run. Another: billing retries on a bad start and tells you honestly when something fails, with no lost purchase.
Audio got attention too. Voices duck the effects under them. Big blasts are no longer dropped when too many sounds play at once.
What I like about raids is that they ask a different skill from the normal waves. In a run you build. In a raid you read a machine, then break it.
Next up: the sea war, and the first big redraw of the worlds.