Waves September Round-up - New Video news

Hello! I must apologise for being late but there was a cat outside and I got distracted. It's been a while since we've done this hasn't it? It feels like only yesterday but somehow it's been over four months. Amazing.

While I like to think that you come to these events for the amazing conversation and my winning personality I suspect you're really only here for the latest Videogram of Waves. Well if that's the case I may as well get it out of the way early.

Too Easy

The last four months have seen our crack team of Funologists at work tweaking and tuning the game so that it is both fun and challenging at the same time! Madness I know but we think we've nearly cracked it. One of their chief concerns has been that our Playtesters had been finding the game rather easy and if you met our Playtesters you would worry. We had to drool proof the keyboards. Of course I jest. Fine bunch of chaps and chapettes all of them. But the worry was real enough. A game that is too easy is a game that gets boring quickly. Nobody wants their games to be boring. As it turns out the big problem was that everybody had too many lives. They were getting them too often and not losing enough to maintain a sense of excitement and tension. Extra Lives now only happen every 10 levels and the Shield no longer recharges but is awarded every 5th level. The result is a much more challenging game that builds and releases tension more often.

Events

The other big change is that we have more events in the game. Previously we just threw all of the enemies into the arena and let God sort them out. In this analogy God would be you. This would ramp up pretty much forever until you died and the whole process would start over again. It was intense but much like listening to the same punk riff loop over and over as somebody turns up the volume; it got annoying and dull after a while. This has been solved by listening to music and stealing all their ideas; big events are now preceded by moments of relatively quiet action that makes them seem even bigger in contrast.

Enemies

Most of the enemies have been tweaked as well with the Virus (Green self-replicating one) undergoing the biggest change; if enough of them are in the same area then one will mutate and if destroyed will explode killing everything nearby (except you natch). You can set up some nice chain reactions with this and it makes it much easier to clear out a big virus bloom that is threatening to take over the entire arena. The "Squidies" as people call them are also now more active and will hunt you down while weaving about. They break apart when shot and the little ones will continue to hunt you but in a more erratic fashion (I very nearly wrote erotic then which would have made this a very different game indeed). Finally the Cube is undergoing a transformation into a Boss; with multiple stages and different behaviours. Currently we only have the first and most simplistic stage done but there are two additional stages designed which should really test your skills.

I think that's about it at the moment. See you in another 4 months (I jest). Toodles!