Hey folks, I've got a medium sized update for you! I've got a lot of other irons in the fire right now, working on story in the background, some other small features that may or may not flesh out entirely and I'm working a bit on a side project which I hope to share with you all soonish.
Balance & Pacing
I've made quite a few tweaks to adjust the difficulty curve dramatically. Basically I want the later zones to feel significantly less like slog than they do now. I've significantly pulled back on resource costs in later zones to power up shield generators and armor scaling of enemies. As I've stated before I think the base difficulty is still too hard and few people are actually completing it so I'm taking some fairly radical steps to fix this. I want people to feel truly challenged in Surge levels so I've relocated some of the more difficult challenges to those levels. Here's a list of what's changing
- Shieldbreakers will not spawn in base levels and have been moved to Surge level 4. These caused some pretty hopeless feeling whiplash if you are caught unaware. Having to repower a single shield generator felt like a death sentence most of the time.
- Removed the surge level effect of random Item Containers tiers. This made the game pretty unfun pretty quickly in the surge levels. I decided to replace this with Shieldbreakers as it's still a challenge you can overcome and play around vs just having to have more resources than ever.
- Last two regions have had their resource requirements for shield generators severely scaled back.
- Most enemies have had their health scaling reduced drastically.
- System augment "Hazards" have been scaled back a bit.
Control Schemes
I've received lots of feedback about folks being disappointed this isn't a twin stick shooter. I've listened and understand the sentiment, it's familiar and easy to pick up and play. I do believe the gameplay achieved with P10's current control scheme adds something unique to the game and have pushed back some against twin stick shooter controls. Additionally I always felt it would blow out the balance of the game, that the game with twin stick would be so ridiculously easy I'd have to rebalance a lot of the game. I've been experimenting with twin stick for a bit now and I'm happy to say some of those things were a bit unfounded.
Today the game can be played both the standard way it worked before or with Twin Stick controls as you may be used to from other top down games. When you first start game you'll be asked which you prefer, with a note from myself about why I believe the Standard experience is special. I hope you all are able to enjoy the game whichever way is most comfortable.
Hope you enjoy these updates! More coming soon as I'm working on a lot in the background that I'm really excited to share with you.