Fides Star Studios

Fides Star Studios

Players first. Liberty in Choice. Gameplay decides.

Cyclone Season: a pixel-art map of the Caribbean with two hurricanes closing in on the islands

Cyclone Season

A weather sandbox game: Influence the weather to spawn, grow, and control hurricanes with real weather concepts. Will the season be calm, or will you wreak destruction?

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Wax on, Wax off

Well, it had to be done.. Completely rebuild achievements, scoring, high scores, the save system, game time, pausing, and about 7 billion iterations on the game balance tweaks. I always hate this part of dev... The first 95% of the work is the easiest. Once you have all the systems in place, it takes a nearly infinite amount of time trying to tune and tweak things to get it ready to ship. Eventually you can't tell if your critiques are good or you are just being overly critical. Now, a short season is about an hour if you let it play out, but I can get through one in about 15 minutes. The longer sessions are a lot more fun now. Maybe it's just from all the testing I did in the first 30 days, but the weather variety month to month really adds a lot changes. I think I'll dub month 2 as the 'hurricane cannon'. If you get lucky on the forecast for some nice warm waters, the slower wind allows them to build enough that it almost seems like Africa is just yeeting Cat 5 storms at the gulf. I love it!

Shop added for tool upgrades

This update is a bit more focused on polishing off the gameplay now. The new map looks great, the new storms look great. Despite using an AI to generate the new map as a starting point, I still ended up spending half a day hand tweaking the thing, but it was so worth it. The game is looking great now. With those out of the way, it was time to think about high scores, finishing up achievements, tool upgrades to reward players for actually following through on the goals system and storm multipliers, etc. With the new map, it also made sense to increase the resolution so there's now a Classic and a Detailed graphics mode. I still want this to be reminescent of 1980s games, but the new Detailed mode is super polished without losing that pixel aesthetic I wanted.