Timed Gameplay

It's the next day and I'm still pretty excited about the last build. I took a look at it and decided a few things needed to change:

• The bloody bits isn't exactly inline with the "cute" message of the game.
• Worrying about your health all the time is annoying
• If you are good at steering the squid, the game isn't terribly challenging.
• There's no "victory" message to give you that sense of accomplishment.
• The skill level doesn't ramp up per-level.

With this in mind I made a few gameplay changes!

• You now get frowny face balls for breaking parts off, no more bloody patches!
• It doesn't end your game anymore if you lose parts! If you lose your feet, it simply becomes harder to reach the goals that are higher up in the sky. Additionally, for every frowny face you produce, your squid loses 5% of his acceleration. You won't be able to jump as high if you lose lots of parts (though this is slightly mitigated by the fact that you have less mass and therefore less water friction).
• There is now a countdown timer in place to make sure you wisk along to your next star expediently. :)
• There are now clear stages and levels. Every level you go up it adds one more stage on, to make the game progressively harder.
• The countdown timer is mostly random, but the minimum value will drop over time. It will eventually bottom out at 5 seconds (around level 60 I think?), but will always have a maximum of 60 seconds.
• The higher-up stars were hard to reach for some people so they also slowly creep up over time. They reach their maximum altitude around level 20.

I think this is really shaping up to be a fun game. Check out Build 28 here.