I finished with fixes and gameplay tweaks a few hours ago and I’m into polishing now. Spent an enjoyable 15-20 minutes playing with SFXR (actually BFXR) to give a bit more feedback when you click buttons, or more importantly, kill baddies.

My IDE has developed a bizarre ‘feature’ whereby if I cut and paste code from one file to another (note: I’m cutting, not copying! – no hideous code duplication going on here), it randomly swaps around all the type names. Even annotations (e.g. @Override) get swapped with other classes from my game or its libraries that are referenced in the file. Despite this, and some confusion of LibGDX’s Actor classes (resizing only has an effect if you invalidate the object’s layout), I’ve been making pretty good progress today.

I’m actually pretty happy with the gameplay now, although I’m worried it might be completely inaccessible, so I’m working on a tutorial to guide people in a bit. I also simplified the controls slightly (dropped one of the two action buttons).

I have about half a dozen parameters to the game, which can affect the difficulty dramatically. I’ve found quite nice set of defaults for now, but I’m planning to provide an options screen for tweaking them. I had a possibly neat (or alternatively, unworkable) idea of taking the ‘evolution’ theme further by ‘evolving’ the default set of options, via a web-based port of the game. That’s not going to happen today though, and I’m not exactly sure what the fitness function would be anyway.

Beginning to get a bit tired now, and making the tutorial isn’t as fun as some of the other game code. The game overall is starting to look pretty complete though and I’m feeling optimistic.

My game still doesn’t *look* much different, but here’s the new start screen (the options button is disabled since the screen isn’t implemented yet):