Working on the infinite mode, I found a couple of threats I really need to address as soon as possible:
- Once you have the long strips weapon, you probably won’t change it, there are only three kinds of melee weapon and that one is the best;
- The only enemy which moves toward the player is the flying pulpi.
As a result, a player has almost no reason to move within the map: the infinite mode becomes boring soon.
So, before falling in the “add more content” trap, I’m considering to re-design at least the current weapons to give the player a reason to break the crates looking for something.
So, let’s start from the current situation.
At the moment there are 3 available weapons in
Standard strips
Range: medium
Attack rate: high
Damage: low
Critical hit chance: medium
Special effects: n/a
Long strips
Range: long
Attack rate: low
Damage: medium
Critical hit chance: high
Special effects: n/a
Exploding strips
Range: high
Attack rate: low
Damage: low
Critical hit chance: medium
Special effects: damages all targets within explosion range
The list is really short, but the focus of the game is not the fighting, but the platforming mechanics and puzzle solving. However in the infinite mode the player faces continuous waves of enemies, so the gameplay IS fighting. I need to revisit the weapon system.
At the moment once you find a new weapon, it’s yours forever and you can change it at any time by swiping on the current weapon icon in the top left corner of the screen. As I said before, once you’ll find the long strips, you’ll probably use them forever. And if I’ll add a better weapon, the player will use it instead of the long strips. So, before adding more weapons, I decided to make them just temporary power-ups. When the player will find the long strips, they’ll be available for about 20 seconds, then he’ll return to standard strips. In this way I hope to obtain a couple of advantages:
- More freedom for me in balancing the difficulty;
- The players will be encouraged to look for crates containing better weapons.
Of course this will require a deep redesign of well tested mechanics (from a certain point of view, I’m dropping the weapons and I’m inserting power-ups), but… well, I’m a SW engineer, that’s my job.
I’ll probably fork the project to guarantee a safe roll-back just in case the new system results worse than the current.
And of course, I need to invent something to address the "immovable" enemies issue... Hope to fix this by simply tuning the enemies IA.
