Features That We Never Iterated and Tested

There are a lot more features and design elements I'd like to incorporate into Flux that we were not able to implement. Here are a few bullet points:

• Provide a way for the player to be able to change his own shape through pickups
• Perhaps there is a red or green energy orb surrounded by an orange circle. When hit, the orange circle explodes, and the player can pickup the energy orb to change his own shape. There are times in the game where you need to change your shape to accomplish a goal, or else you're stuck. There's the option of shaking your device to change one of the elements on screen, and that's a nice feature, but it takes time away from you, and I'd like to be able to have a way where it's not a negative thing to be able to change your shape. It shouldn't happen to often, but if you made it a reward for shooting a moving target, then you had to go pick it up, probably amidst enemy fire, it might offer some cool additional gameplay.

• Powering up. I'd like to create a way for the player to power up and require more hits before it changes shape. I would visually represent this with small shapes at the base of each shape. For example, a circle might start the game with one small circle trailing him. As he gets more points, he'll power up represented by additional small circles.

The other shapes might look like this:

When hit with red or green bullets, you'd be able to visually tell what you were about to turn into.

Once all of the mini shapes were filled up, you'd turn into the next shape.

• Shape changing. One of the things that has always been confusing for players in this game was the evolution/devolution idea. A player rarely grasped that the shapes were evolving or devolving when hit with the colored bullets. When I first observed people playing the game, this was one of the first things I realized. I've since considered how we might change that and recently I've played around with the idea that red bullets turn you red, and green bullets turn you green. If you're hit with a red bullet and you're already red, then you'd turn into a white square. The circle's bullets however wouldn't be able to turn anyone into white because I think that would make the white too powerful. We could give it simple bullets compared to the triangle and square's more powerful bullets. I think this would be more intuitive, and what the player is expecting.