So I've been rather silent lately. Too much on my plate with difficulty finding solutions.
Variation or ChaosThe original release of Devader has 14 different types of minor enemies that are just spiders. There are others too, but the spiders are pretty much the filler unit to add that extra bit of chaos and support the bigger enemies. In an earlier post I mentioned adding a ton of new alternatives to the spiders with different behaviors. So instead of 14 small enemies (peons) I had over 60...
A level in Devader is split into 6 waves + boss wave. Each wave has a simple definition specifying which of the 14 spiders will appear. This can look like this [2] or [1,8] or [-5]. [2] means only spider 2 can appear. [1,8] activates spider 1 and 8. [-5] allows all spiders from 0 to 5 to appear.
To prevent having to redo everything I made 4 groups out 56 peons, so 4 groups of 14. Spawning peon [1] now meant randomly selecting from the 4 groups. So peon A1, B1, C1 or D1. This turned out to be very chaotic. I then switched to seeded-random to chose which enemies would appear in which wave. So wave X would always only spawn A1 or B1, but no longer both.
The random seed is determined by the players upgrade choices. This makes sense for the game as the upgrade choices determine the outcome of the game with different final bosses and various other things.
Play-testing showed me the experience was still highly chaotic as every wave would throw something entirely new at you. The player never had time to get to know an enemy as it would mostly only appear once and then never again. So instead of per wave I now make the choice of peon on a level basis. There are 7 levels. Each level specifies 2 new peon types that can appear. So in a full run you will only encounter 14 different peons (not entirely true). This seems to be a fairly good solution, but it will need some balancing and testing for sure.
img desc: The gray creatures spawn the blue pulsating stationary explosive creatures. It can get out of hand when your main damage dealer is blocked by the outer ring, as is the case here. (fixed)
Besides the peons I had also created a huge amount of creatures I call grunts. These beasts are much larger and more menacing. To include them into the game I again used the seeded random information I had defined for each wave. Only waves without mini-bosses or bosses can spawn grunts and when one appears it reduces the amount of peons that can be spawned. It's pretty straight forward and should work nicely, but certainly needs some balancing and testing.
Power-UpsPower-ups in Devader have been very straight forward. There is hardly a reason not to pick them up, there is not much of a choice going on. Weapon power-ups stack and you get the rewards from both while they last. Power-Ups have limited ammo, it was my way of trying to make it a good idea to preserve them by not shooting. I don't think it really does, or at least it does not work on me. As picking up power-ups is a no brainer, it's not really interesting. To make things worse not having power-ups kind of sucks, as you feel a lot less powerful. If you get destroyed you lose them all so it's quite troubling. To mitigate this, I added a new feature. When you lose your bot the power-ups you are carrying are blown out and you get the chance to pick them back up. I started off by allowing weapon power-ups to be retrieved and eventually added HP + SP to the list. HP and SP add +1 capacity to health and shields.
It makes dying less punishing, but also gives you the choice of taking additional risk to retrieve what you have lost or to accept the loss. In a multi player game your allies will have to go in and collect your stuff as respawning takes a bit of time. I have not tested it yet though.
HP is special in Devader. There is a container you can pick up and it restores all your health. If you are at full health you get +1 HP-capacity. It's pretty valuable to get the latter, but if you just lose a bit of HP you miss out. You can restore HP by grazing bullets and picking it up later, but sometimes there are no bullets. My above changes lead to destroyed HP containers leaving the same remnants as if you had just lost your robot. So a destroyed container no longer restores your full HP but gives you +1 HP capacity. I noticed while playing that I sometimes rather waited for the containers to get destroyed as it was more beneficial. But waiting is not really fun. Soooo... I decided to make containers destructible for the player. This was actually something that was in the game right at the start, but at the time it didnt really work. Now it makes it a lot more interesting.
Linux issuesOn a different note I received some linux-customer feedback and one player (maybe 2) have an issue with gamepad on Linux. It seems like this is not something that I am directly causing and assume it's a problem with webkit. Main issue is that I've made a huge amount of changes to the game and I am not in the most balanced of versions right now. Nonetheless after plugging through all of the above I decided to make a new version. Windows went fine, but the Linux version did not work off the bat. Turns out my older laptop no longer can run the game, due to the fact that I now have a 8192x8192 texture atlas and no longer 4096x4096. Turns out 4096 was the upper limit... So now what do I do? I currently only see one option, if it's supposed to work on older hard-ware and that is recalculating the texture atlas for every level. AAAAARGH. Not something I want to do as it will cause delays. I have no idea what can be expected from most peoples hard-ware.
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