So, after trying to develop 2 new games and realising both rely on a technology we are currently UNABLE TO USE, I've had to retreat back to the spaceship game working title'd Mothership, now my last, best hope of actually finishing something.
Going back over it it's easy to see how immature a lot of my design choices were, but also I was impressed at how ingenious I can be when faced with a difficult problem, a lot of time and internet resources, and no idea what I'm doing. Having got to grips with the basics of AS3 though I think I'd rather do it in that, but unfortunately I've already done so much in AS2 that a port would be even more work than starting over.
Basically now my task is threefold: First I need to go back and plan out the interface better - I think I was going for immersiveness over clarity which only works, if it works at all, if you're prepared to put a lot of time and effort into art, sound and story, and I'm not. So screw that. Plain, user-friendly menus all the way.
Secondly, I need to figure out the bits of the game I haven't done yet, most importantly, game progression - the same mission over and over makes a boring game. Lots of different missions makes a confusing and difficult-to-program game. I am at least planning to keep mission objectives quite simple and limited, though I grudgingly admit that once again I'm being a little ambitious by proposing to string missions along a dynamic storyline. However, my internal game-designer assures my internal publisher that this will actually save me effort in the long run since it'll give instant engagement and a good deal of replay value for a minimal investment of work, as well as giving the game a gimmick that'll stand out against a background of very similar 'kill-baddies-get-powerups-kill-baddies' games.
Thirdly and most importantly, I have to look over my code and try and figure out what the hell I was doing - naturally I barely commented anything and had to work out most of the techniques I needed on the fly so the result of my labours is somewhat... impenetrable. Unless I can reverse-engineer my own code and make additions that are compatible with it, there isn't even the possibility of a game. Still, I figured it out once; I can do it again.
Once those 3 tasks are complete, I can deal with the minor business of designing, drawing, coding including and balancing every single enemy and ship component, and writing, programming and implementing every mission, then balancing modules, enemies and missions and fixing the inevitable legions of bugs. So yeah, more on that in 3 or 4 years.
