v0.2: The Drone Update

New Feature: Drones

I've added Drones to the game. These are free upgrades presented to the player after completing an even-numbered round. The player chooses one and it orbits around them during waves, contributing its effect on its cooldown. There are three drones:

1. A healing drone. This one heals you 1 HP per second.
2. A gold drone. This one gives you 1 gold per second.
3. A projectile drone. This one fires one of your projectiles -- this includes all of its upgrades, like damage or projectile speed/size -- every 2 seconds at the nearest enemy.

As you can likely guess from the cooldowns, my assumption here is that the projectile drone is strongest because it is (currently) the only one that benefits from the player's upgrades out of the box. In its own way, it indirectly gives you money (because the enemy ships it destroys drop gold) and health (because destroyed enemies cannot hurt you).

I suspect the healing drone is weakest, not least because it doesn't do anything if you are sitting at max HP, which means healing drones 2+ are worse than the first one. I think in some ways this is endemic to healing as a mechanic, and I think in other ways I can still mitigate the issue by adding things like Overheal (so you can heal above your "maximum" by some number).

I am looking forward to Ethan proving that actually the gold drone is the strongest by a longshot and I was being crazy when I implemented it at these values.

Going forward as I balance these I would like to adhere to the core principle of their being free and being selected every other round. In my mind these are a nice way to either smooth out the upgrade shop's randomness -- if you haven't been given the opportunity to buy any health regen, you can snag a healing drone -- or lean even further into a one-dimensional build.

I have plans for adding upgrades to the shop (i.e., the ones the player purchases) to upgrade these drones, as well. 

An Eye On Balance

These drones will certainly make the game easier. There's no downside to them, they are free. So I have made the game a little harder across the board by adding 1 to every wave size. (Remember, "wave size" is the number of enemies on screen that the spawner refills to every few seconds. If the wave size is 6 and a spawn triggers when there are 2 enemies alive, it will add 4 enemies to refill the wave.) I don't know that this will do much for game balance but it's a step in the right direction, at least.

I have heard feedback that the first waves (as many as the first two tiers of enemies, even) don't present enough damage to the player, and they can be beaten by dodging and/or "turtling." Later rounds have a faster kill time and are less susceptible to this. I think this feedback is basically correct but I want to see how the increased wave size across the board shakes out before looking to tweak these rounds specifically.

Overall I think the game is balanced ....... fine. I think the rounds are a little long, particularly the last few (which are 60+ seconds long). I think the beginning rounds are much easier than later rounds, and I think deaths are typically caused by a surge of burst damage and that can feel bad. I don't know if that's something I have to consciously fix or what -- I think it depends on how much counterplay the player feels is available to them. I do think that the alternative -- dying from repeated low-damage instances -- happens to me sometimes, but rarely. I think piling up lifesteal, health regen, and max health is the soundest strategy to win the game currently.

Upcoming Work

Going forward, I don't have that many things on the roadmap before I find and pay an actual-factual artist to provide a cohesive sprite set, font, UIs, backgrounds, etc. to the game. I think the systems in place are fun and I think the game's most glaring issues at this stage have much less to do with gameplay than with the fact that, like, there's no sound and all the sprites are very obviously compiled from disparate itch.io asset packs. My hope is to begin the art and music search in July.

Until then, the features I'd like to add are:

1. Upgrades to the drones. Buy, with gold, an upgrade that makes your projectile drone shoot more rapidly.
2. Downstream of that, I need to implement smarter logic in the shop. It is entirely random now -- you're shown your selections based only on their rarity. I have to add logic to encompass prerequisites, for example, or to increase the odds of being shown an upgrade if you already have upgrades in its same family. Stuff like that.
3. Upgrades to your economy: higher interest rate, higher interest cap, increased odds of being shown more-rare upgrades.
4. I would like to add at least one boss battle. I need to think about what that means in a game like this. Others in the genre accomplish this with one enormous enemy that has a visible health bar. Can I do something cooler?
5. Multiple player ships and the character selection screen required to choose one.

If I had to put those in order I would say Player Ships has gotta be first because that's the one that provides a new system, rather than just more content. The rest is sort of all in the same bucket. I can add more upgrades forever, but giving the player more starting ships to choose from is going to provide much more value. Y'know?