Let's face it. I balanced this game's difficulty to be pretty brutal when you start the game. You SHOULD be dying at the start. If you don't die on the 2nd level, then congrats, you probably aren't fully human (seriously, you might be a starseed or something), and you already broke the game! (Just make sure you die on the 2nd level eventually, or you won't progress the story)
This brutality is to throw in your face how strong and nasty these invading bugs truly are. They're 7 to 8 feet tall, weigh over 400 pounds, and they have a bulletproof exoskeleton that's 3 inches thick. They aren't here to play nice. They're here to take over our governments and militaries and flatten anything that gets in the way of that mission (that's YOU). Without proper armor and non-bullet-based weapons, you aren't going to stand a chance. You NEED those top-secret pieces of tech, and you NEED the secret part of our military to give it to you! So read up! Learn what's really going on so that YOU. ARE. PREPARED. FOR. INVASION. THIS IS 2023.
DO NOT SAY I DIDN'T WARN YOU.
With that out of the way, it turns out that you *can* do pretty well in the initial parts of this game if you take the time to figure it out. That's why I briefly stopped making more story to get the achievement system working, so that you can gauge whether you've got what it takes to be a super-soldier against the bugs.
Oh, and I added a settings page to rebind keys and to change sound volumes. It was a pain, but it should be worth it in the long run. Yes! The long run! This game is nowhere near finished!
Next up, I plan to make more gameplay where you take a squad/platoon of flamethrower soldiers and try to retake the state capitol from the bugs. Programming the AI of so many friendly NPCs should be fun/interesting, but programming the flamethrowers should be even more fun (I think).
The primary objective of this game was to ensure that people had exposure to this concept, which I really burned hard to accomplish in April 2023, so now I'm going to try to throttle back into a more sustainable cruise mode from here on out. There's quite a bit more story to go through, and once the psionics part of the game's story gets further along, I think eventually the updates will spin off into a sequel game under a different name. We'll see.
Either way, it's time to pave a new future for humanity through these dark times where we eventually find the light and ascend into a utopia of our own making! Exciting times to be alive!
