HDog Alpha 0.7405 X-Ray is shipped. This update focused on zone and enemy variety.

New Zones!

There are five new zone types for you to fight in. Only half the possible zones will appear in a particular run, so zone one to three now all randomize between two possible types. In the final game you'll need to unlock the alternate version of each zone, but in the current build all types can appear from the start. Zone three should still lead into endless play, now featuring zone three's enemy pool (hasn't been tested much). The new zones have some quirks of their own, but there is still more I want to do in terms of zone specific mechanics. Right now, the big gameplay differences in zones come from the different enemy types you'll encounter there.

New Enemies!

He game got 10 new enemy types and 10 new enemy attachments. Some of the hostiles are unique to certain zone types. Most additions appear in the mid and late game, but the alternate variant of zone one got it's own new ground enemies too. Alongside that, the overall difficulty and spawning behaviour of the game got an overhaul. Prevailing in Zone 2 should pose more of a challenge now and zone 3 can get pretty vicious. In general, late game enemies move more erratically, attack more relentlessly and fire more projectiles, or deny larger areas of the playing field with their attacks. As before, some of enemies are small one-component fodder, while others have individual parts that can be damaged and destroyed individually.

Enemy Mechanics

The goal for the update was to make the new enemies rather distinct and pose a unique thread each.

Some of the new mechanics are:

Cruise Missiles: Work a lot like homing missiles, but explode on miss in lager explosions . Also right now they can't be redirected like homing missiles.

Photon-based Weapons: Enemy lasers and photon shots will ignore your shield and always deal heart damage. Evade them at all cost!

Snipers: Engage at long range with heavily telegraphed attacks . In the late game they might start using photon based weapons.

Air-Mines: Effectively deny areas of the map while slowly dropping towards the ground. They work a lot like your mines.

Dangerous Death: Some hostiles or attachments explode on death or spawn projectiles.

Melee: One late game enemy will switch to melee attacks of you get to close.

Flares: One late game enemy will deploy flares if it is targeted with homing missiles. The flares work like your flares.

Optimization and minor fixes

Apart from the new content I also worked on fixing minor problems and I looked into optimizing certain areas of the game. Mines should be less taxing now, but I still have to consider improvements on homing shots and missiles. There are a few other bottle necks like the prop-avoidance behaviour of enemies. I'll look into that at some point.

That is it for HDog Ace Access X-Ray. One minor update already went live to fix some stuff I missed in 0.7400. Please continue to let me know if you encounter any errors. The next update (Gamma) will add new bosses to the game, having each zone feature multiple possible boss encounters. There is also one final zone I still want to add. If you'd like to track my progress you can check out the games public dev Trello: https://trello.com/b/JEMcU3rX/hyperspace-dogfights-development

Cheers!

Stefan – Sleeper Games