Most of these features were done last week, but I like to keep these updates in sync with r/gameDev’s ScreenShotSaturdays.

Sorry about the bad mic quality. A new headset mic is on my shortlist. In today’s alpha video, we get to see the following new features:

Wingman Plane

The wingman plane is a friendly plane that follows you in formation. Right now, he just moves to match your current vector while flying close, top right of your current position. I’ll add in the ability for the wingman to find a position relative to the player’s current rotation, so we can have multiple wingmen flanking your sides and flying behind you. These wingmen can also follow other wingmen, so I can mess around with setting up cool attack formations. Fun stuff!

Aggressive Enemy Plane

Now the enemy plane will try and hunt you down. He’ll do his best to fly directly behind you at a certain distance which correlates to whether he wants to lock missiles from afar or pepper you with bullets from up close. At first, he was tenacious and could NOT be tracked for missile lock, so I added the ability to confuse your opponent by flying too close and breaking off. This makes him wander aimlessly while he tries to ‘find’ you, giving you plenty of time to swoop in from behind and…

Missile lock and FIRE!

Heat seeker missiles have been added. You now press the right thumbstick to activate the target reticle. If you can get it to hover over a particular enemy, missile lock occurs and heat seekers will use it seek and destroy your target. AWESOME!

Object pools for all projectiles and particles

It is INCREDIBLY important to watch your memory and complexity in game, especially for weaker platforms like the OUYA and older mobile phones. So I’ve implemented object pools for all bullets, missiles, and particles that will keep memory consumption constant. Now the screen can me filled with hundreds of bullets with no ill effects on frame rate.

Particles

It’s not much to look at right now, but the game now supports animated particles. I’ll have to MAKE some awesome effects to stress test it, but expect to see a lot of cool stuff. Smoke from damaged planes, shrapnel and fire from missile/bullet strikes, clouds, birds, etc.