v0.0.7 -- Balancing Philosophy

Good afternoon I would very much like a job.

Today's changes -- and I'm about to get back in the kitchen on this, there might be another patch later -- are entirely about balance, game feel, and fun.

This is what I changed

1. The player ship is now, in a word, stronger.
   1. The projectile damage has been increased from 15 to 20.
   2. The fire rate has been increased from 4 per second to 5 per second.
   3. The movespeed has been increased from 300 to 400.
2. The early-game economy is now juiced up a bit.
   1. The gold drops for all enemies (not just tier one) have been increased by 50%. For the first tier of enemies (Rounds 1-5), this means an increase from 10 to 15.
3. The early (Tier One) enemies have had their damage increased. What was 10 is 12 and what was 5 is 6. I do not think this will make the earlier rounds much more punishing. Instead, I am bringing this Tier's "how long in seconds until the player is killed by projectiles" metric a little closer to that of the other rounds. The "time to kill" clearly increases with each Tier, it's just now that Tier One is much less of an outlier. Thank you Mike for this change.
4. Colliding your ship into an enemy ship no longer deals a flat 20 damage. Instead, it deals twice the enemy's projectile damage. I am aware this means you will take more damage from colliding with a larger ship than before. Expect this value to change sooner rather than later.
5. The logic behind the way in which I spawn enemies has been changed to feel (hopefully) less chaotic and more like an ocean wave coming in and out.
   1. Unless the fix I added doesn't work, enemies should now not spawn right on top of the player. I think it worked, though. I did some testing where I cranked the spawn rate extremely high and the enemies that popped up (well over 200) formed a neat little sphere around the player ship but not on top of it. This is done by calculating the distance between the proposed spawn and where the player is at the time. I can change this value if it's unsatisfactory.
   2. I will spare you the details on how the enemies used to spawn, unless it's asked for, but the new method is as follows:
      1. Each round has a "wave size" value. This scales up over time but not to a simple formula, it's similar to round duration where I just sorta went with some values that felt reasonable. Round One has a wave size of three, where Round 20 (the last one) has a wave size of six.
      2. At the beginning of the round, when there are zero enemies, we spawn Wave Size enemies. We then set a timer for five seconds that, if it expires, refills the wave. "Refill the wave" means it spawns the difference between Wave Size and the enemies currently on screen. I am aware this means if the player never shoots anything then there will always be Wave Size enemies, but this player will never purchase any upgrades and eventually be one-shot, so who cares.
      3. When you kill an enemy, if there remain 1 or 0 enemies left on the screen, we set a timer to refill the wave in one second. They do not spawn immediately.
      4. Refilling the wave resets the 5-second fallback timer we initialized when the round loads. If you are killing things quickly enough, the fallback timer will not expire.
      5. The hope here is that the enemies are killed and spawned in an interesting ebb and flow. The player can influence the influx of enemies by ramping up or slowing down the speed with which they're killed. (This also means a player who can't easily kill things will face fewer enemies, which might keep them alive but will ultimately doom their run.)

This is why I changed it

I want the game to be more fun and I want the player to be more active. I think the game, prior to these changes -- and maybe even still, this is a game in motion, not a game in stasis -- is balanced in a way that makes it much more about dodging than it is about killing. It isn't that I want the player to not care at all about surviving, but rather that I want the player to feel powerful. I want them to be given the initial strength and resource accrual to make that happen quickly.

To that end, the next two things on my list are mechanics to help the player survive as they deal damage: Shield Pickups (which drop when enemies are destroyed) and a Lifesteal mechanic (where the player heals upon dealing damage).

Thank you please continue playing the game thank you.