After settling in to the “real” game industry, I’m finding that I’m quite enjoying it. But since I live alone now and my xbox is broken (dirty disc errors be DAMNED!!!), I started thinking about starting a little side project to keep me busy in my down time. What I decided to do was start to plan and design a sequel to my game Diggkiller. I made that game originally under heavy pressure of unemployment, in the hopes that it could help leverage me into a job (guess it worked) and was only designed with the bare minimum of what I foresaw in my grand vision, and made sure I could develop it in a short period of time.

Now I have the luxury of having a day job and a codebase to work from, I can fully flesh out the game further and add new things that are just plain pimp. I want the game to rely less on the “Digg” gimmick and actually be awesome and fun and original as a shooter all its own. I can also refactor the shit out of my code to make it run smoother, and be able to add all kinds of modular stuff, and sick visual effects.

It would be cool to have input from people that might actually read this post about some cool custom attacks that people would like to see, based on the keywords in comments. Like “Ron Paul” could trigger some sort of “Money Bomb” attack. Stuff like that. If you’ve got ideas, post a comment.

Some things I am planning for DiggKiller 2:

- a way to adjust the game speed, to go in slo-mo or speed up, for crazy matrix-like explosions

- WAY better enemy AI, instead of just randomly shooting and moving, have cool patterns and behaviors for the different “classes” of enemies.

- deeper digg integration, and more dynamic topic categories (in case digg changes them)

- a lot more customization in terms of weapons. I’d like to create a completely customizable and upgradeable attack authoring tool, so people can design the speed and angle of their various attacks built from weapons they unlock.

- a much better scoring system. No longer simply the amount of “diggs” killed, but more based on how fast, and how Badass you dispatch your enemies.

- accounts that save all of your game data, weapons, custom attacks, and custom ship skins. And of course, high scores

- a shitload of cooler visual effects: missile trails, crazy colorful explosions, and whatever I can think of/implement

- better control scheme (no more caps-lock, shift, and control)

- music of some kind

- make everything very modular so weapons and custom attacks can be added with ease, even after the game is out.

- different themed backgrounds instead of the one “space” one

- a bunch more shit that I will think of later

The first diggkiller game got such an overwhelmingly positive response, I know that If I can do what I set forth here, it will be legendary. I really like the idea of having accounts and tracking everyone’s stats and having leaderboards for all sorts of different things. Hopefully I can do that with all the crazy php I now know.

Anyway, I’m gonna take my time with this one, and one day, it will be the MOST epic flash game/mashup out there.