Hey everyone. I was going to wait until I released Diver to post another blog, but that was taking too long, so I figured I'd talk about why.

What I've done…

Diver has made fantastic progress over the last month and a bit. It's nothing like that little demo you guys played. Except you can still collect gold. And upgrade some stats.

I've implemented goals and special items you can buy with "awesome points" garnered from achieving said goals such as a periscope, a gold-to-oxygen convertor and a get-out-of-death-free card.

I've implemented hazards such as sharks, pointy bits of coral and mines. I've stuck in some underwater caves that you can catch your breath in. I've increased level size by five times (height-wise) and made it so that the game only generates a new area once you've collected all the gold in the current one.

I've stuck in some achievements, and some special special items as rewards for achieving them. At the moment you get the relevant special item once you achieve the achievement, and can use it in all future game sessions, but I'm thinking of permanently unlocking it in the shop instead.

I've probably tweaked and implemented a lot of other stuff as well, but none of that readily comes to mind. Oh, wait, here's one: it is now possible to operate the menus with the keyboard, but if you still want to do it with the mouse, you can do that too.

What I'm going to do…

Difficult increases. At the moment, if you clear an area of gold, the new area that gets generated will be pretty much the same as the one you just cleared. Playtesting has revealed that that gets old fast. I'm going to change that so sharks move slightly faster, hazards are generally more numerous, the number of caves decreases by 1 with every new area (so by area 4, you'd better've got your oxygen tank sufficiently upgraded, pal), and gold is more numerous (seeing as the player will have higher expenses by area 2 and on than in area 1). Or maybe I should just make gold pieces give you areanum amount of gold (1 in area 1, 2 in area 2, etc). Hmm…

A boss fight. With an octopus. Basically, a one of the items in the shop is "Passage To Great Octopus Region" or whatever, and it costs a good lot of gold and/or awesome points. The player is advised to grind until he feels he is ready, and then go fight the octopus.

Systematic cohesion is important, so I'm not just going to give the player a raygun all of a sudden with which to fight the boss. I've stuck in a new gold-bag-kicking mechanic (which can also be used against sharks, so it doesn't feel tacked on), so the player can kick gold-bags into the boss to hurt him.

If the player has been playing too much Iji, he can also do the technical pacifist thing and kill the boss by collecting all the gold he's sitting on, so that he falls to his doom in the pit I'll stick below him.

Thoughts?

F1ak3r