Aerial Battles Anew

This screenshot. I love this screenshot.

This is a paused frame during a combat between computer-controlled AIs. The far aircraft has just avoided a missile from a third aircraft (not visible here) and is firing at an enemy. The enemy went down in the very next frame.

You may remember this as the aircraft game that I have been making for so long (latest update way back).

So, I had put off this game for quite a while for the sake of other projects, and for the last 3 months I had quit gamedev'ing altogether. I only recently missed it and came back.

Since then, I:

• Did the very annoying and soul-draining job of updating the project to the latest Unity version. It was left at version 4.3.
• Evolved the AI. AI aircraft can now dodge missiles and use flares.
• (Oh yeah, since the last update, I had also added missiles and flares in the game).
• Revamped the UI.
• Incorporated large-scale battles by testing and tweaking for battles with bigger numbers of aircraft, and respawning aircraft.

This last point is actually an important improvement on the gameplay, since I soon realised that last-man-standing battles are tiresome:

• When you died, you had to restart and go over the boring "fly until you meet the enemy" process again.
• Battles often ended up with you and a foe left, chasing each other around in circles.

So you incorporate quick-respawn, and combats evolve into this beautiful, never-ending mess:

Trust me, it's great.

Next up in the todo list is, among other things, adding more aircraft types.

F-16 is coming right up (This is an in-progress screenshot. Looks too gray. I know).

That's all for now. Lots of work to be done.

Thanks for sticking around.

-Kostas