It’s time we told you the truth— Jet Lancer doesn’t end at the credits. Like many games out there today, Jet Lancer will feature a New Game+ mode which allows players to play through the game again facing new challenges along the way. However, New Game+ for Jet Lancer is far from being the same game but harder, it’s an integral part of the overall experience and we wanted to talk with you about how we’re thinking about its implementation. Welcome to DISPATCH_03: Behind the Scenes of New Game+

Scope

Scope creep is an easy trap to fall into, doubly so when it’s regarding features and elements that we’re passionate about. As a core team of two, we have to consider what we can realistically undertake since each new element compounds on our development time. So we asked ourselves a couple questions: How do we create awesome new gameplay experiences using the tools we have already made? How can we add greater complexity and nuance to Jet Lancer’s combat without starting on brand new items from scratch? And then from there we set ourselves a goal: We were going to make a challenging experience that builds upon the difficulty curve established in a first playthrough. Luckily for us, New Game+ is a great opportunity to do exactly that! Using the systems we had already built let us assume that players would have some level of familiarity which let us get a little more clever and complex. So while you’ll be seeing some old enemies, they’ve got some new tricks up their sleeves.

Difficulty

We always had a really specific idea of it’s design in mind. Instead of making the game harder just by increasing basic enemy stats like health and damage or just throwing more cannon fodder at the player, we wanted to bring fresh experience to the table, utilizing existing campaign mode as a base to push variety and difficulty further.

In New Game+ enemy pilots receive AI improvements, making them more aggressive and fun to fight against, and we’ve upgraded their jets with expanded attack patterns, making them deadlier and more unpredictable in combat.

On top of some brand new boss fights in New Game+, existing bosses are equipped with more aggressive AI and new attack patterns. When we were initially designing Jet Lancer we tried to push everything to the maximum, but that meant that some of the ideas we had turned out to be a bit too much and created unwanted difficulty spikes during a first playthrough. New Game+ allowed us to save those original ideas, while having a more balanced and well-rounded difficulty curve throughout the first campaign by tweaking each boss to fit into the story mode’s difficulty progression.

Growth and Improvement

Beneath the carbon-fiber fuselage, Jet Lancer is a game about learning and personal growth, and we wanted to reflect this both in the raw gameplay and in the narrative. We want you to be able to look back at challenges that once felt challenging to see how much you’ve improved. As you progress we wanted to show you new elements of Ash’s experience that we hope will lead to a satisfying conclusion..

We’re not going to tell you about that bit though, you’ll have to play it for yourself ;)

Thanks for checking out this update on Jet Lancer. We hope to have some more news for you soon. Wishlists are one of the most important metrics we can leverage in making Jet Lancer a success, so if you haven't added Jet Lancer to your wishlist we would really appreciate it if you did.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/913060

Thanks again for reading, over and out,

Vladimir