Week of Replayability and Polish

Protocol Xeno

A lot of progress was made this week. I worked on many small features, bug fixes, quality-of-life improvements, and other things intended to make the game more fun to play for longer.

Balance Changes

I designed and implemented a series of major balance tweaks to make the enemies feel more competent without making the game harder, make bosses scarier, and encourage diverse playstyles.

I improved the speed and homing of missiles to make missile enemies a threat. I came up with the designs for improved laser and cannon AIs. These changes alongside some damage changes made it so that enemies were much more likely to hit the player if they were only passively moving and made normal enemies seem more competent but a reduction in overall enemy damage meant that the enemies were doing a significant amount more damage meaning that the games' difficulty didn't change much.

I also changed how all of the bosses' weapons worked such that they would be different from their normal enemy counterparts and a dramatic increase in boss damage meant that bosses went from being the easiest part of the game to one of the harder parts. The uniqueness of their weapons also made the bosses stand out more. I also designed new AIs for these bosses so that they would use their weapons in a unique way.

I also changed how owning multiple weapons works. I made it so that once you have upgraded one weapon all other weapons were cheaper to upgrade. This meant that owning multiple weapons would not result in the player being underpowered.

Combo Meter

Previous the score mechanic had been mostly useless and left little room for competition or challenge for skill players. I designed and implemented a combo system that encouraged skilled players to strive for speed and reckless behavior that made the game harder but only for players who wanted the challenge of getting a new high score. The way it worked was simple: it would multiply the player's score when the player didn't take a break from killing enemies except during boss fights and grace periods when the timer was paused. This encouraged skilled players to stop farming upgrades and focus on rapidly killing enemies which means that they were often underpowered compared to non-highscore-chasing players. This created an implicit and optional difficulty in the game which helps with replayability dramatically.

Moonflail Charge

So we have been quite bad at sticking to our feature lockdown; however, during our playtesting sessions, we noticed that very few of the playtesters used the moon flail and that it seemed like a worse version of the laser. Also during our playtesting many of the testers expressed dissatisfaction with the movement system and no incentive to switch weapons to the moon fail we decided to give the moon fail the ability to make the player dash. This added more complexity to the movement system, made the moon fail a practical weapon, and gave reason to switch to the moon fail when using multiple weapons.

UI Improvements

For the UI I implemented a pointer that would point towards enemies and scale with their distance. This UI is meant to help when finding enemies on the larger map and to give the player an idea of how many enemies there are.

I also wrote and implemented a tips system that would display tips on various things we saw playtesters struggling with.