Too late to get a picture today, but there's a major new system in Happyponygate. It doesn't look like much, but still a lot of work was involved. It's not done yet by any means, either, but as the name of this post implies, it is the Goal/Mission system. I think I'm calling them missions, although at this point the pause menu calls them Goals.
You obtain missions in one of two ways: you get the story missions automatically as you go along. As soon as you complete one, the next one is assigned. It's just a linear series of a few missions. There's also another type of mission you get automatically, as you will see in a moment. All the rest of the missions, the vast majority, are obtained by finding the mission icon in the world. They sit there bouncing up and down, as mission icons tend to, so exploring around and finding them all is part of the game. I think that makes for a much more interesting 'hidden goodie' than just coins or packages.
Missions come in 3 types:
Timed Missions - Anytime you pick up a timed mission, all the other mission icons in the world turn transparent and you can't pick them up until you fail or succeed at your timed mission. These are things like "Beat 20 Marshmallow Men in 30 seconds" and other things.
Normal Missions - Well, they're normal. You can have tons of these at a time, and be working towards them all. All of the story missions are normal, as are lots of the non-story missions. A simple example would be "Beat 500 enemies" - you're always making progress toward that.
Mini-Missions - Unlike the other two types, these are repeatable all you like, and automatically start up when you enter a vehicle that is appropriate to them (maybe there will be other mini-missions, but right now it's just car-based ones). There are some wacky ideas I have for these, but they are obviously inspired by Grand Theft Auto, and often are just what you'd think: Get in a taxicab, and you can deliver Gumdrop Guys around town for money (same rules as Crazy Taxi, pretty much). Get in a police car and you get a combat mission, made tricky by the fact that you lose if you get out of the car or it gets destroyed. These missions will be randomly generated, and just something you can do any time for fun and money. Failing these missions is totally harmless, so you can always use these special vehicles just like normal vehicles if you want.
All the missions belong in one of 5 categories: Hero, Vandal, Racer, Warrior, and Helper (I hate that last name, but I can't think of a better way of describing it). So if you get a mission to go smash a bunch of mailboxes, that's a Vandal mission. Completing missions of a given type gives you points of that type. I don't yet have a particular reason why you want these points yet, except that 5 of the missions are "Get 10,000 points of this type". I'll come up with something a little more substantial eventually, but mainly they're just there to accumulate as you play. I also may give out points of the different types as you play - 1 Vandal Point for every object you smash, 1 Warrior point for every enemy beaten, 1 Racer Point for every few seconds spent driving faster than a certain speed, and I don't know what for the other two.
So that's a very major part of the game. It's also very incomplete and just barely begun (similar to all the other parts). I hope to have literally hundreds of missions, but it'll probably be a bit of work to come up with them, so I have no idea how many will make it in. But hey, I managed to finally make a crosshair today!
