Replicator - Version 0.2 Is Coming

Earlier this month I signed up for itch.io and shared my first build of Replicator. This was a rough showcase of some of the concepts that I had been playing around with recently and was thinking of building into a game. After playing through the six levels a handful of times I quickly determined that the current "game" wasn't much fun to play and I needed to do some tweaking. Version 0.2 is still being finalized and I'll hopefully have a working demo build to share soon, but I wanted to share some of the major changes coming here today.

What's New in Version 0.2

Replicator has moved closer to an arcade/tower defense style game. That doesn't mean I'm completely giving up on the puzzle game aspect, just in this early stage of development I think it's wise to prototype as many different concepts as quickly as possible in order to learn as much as I can. Here's a bit of what's new in Version 0.2.

• Replicators are now enemies and must be killed before getting to an "exit" point. 
• Replicators enter the world in waves and will proceed along different paths to the final exit. 
• Food spawners are now player defense towers that shoot projectiles at replicators instead of feeding them.
• Different towers target different Replicator types which keep the "puzzle" aspect of the game alive.
• I've also added some free graphics from Itch.IO's asset pool in order to give the game some life and learn a small bit about animation.

Thoughts on Changes

The most important thing about these changes is that it's taught me how to go about changing functionality of a game without starting over from the start. I've also learned a lot about how to better organize my code and even had a few cases of "wow that's a much better way to do this" moments. 

My goal is to finish up Version 0.2 by Friday/Saturday of this week and I'll have that build up on itch.io for you to demo by early next week. 

Until then <3 John!