Hi Everyone,
After a few long months of work, Mech Armada is finally coming to console. The release date is December 8th. Here on Steam there is also a new update waiting for you.
The Problem
I want to talk a bit about the topic of difficulty, which is (pun intended) a difficult topic.
There is an understanding among players that roguelikes/roguelites are going to be difficult, especially at first. The heart of these games is to learn to play and develop your skill through multiple retries (and deaths) until you master them, little by little. That means the "skill floor" (how skilled you have to be to beat the game, even if just barely) is pretty high. This is a problem for some players, as they may never be able to reach that skill floor and are forced to leave the game, frustrated.
In Mech Armada I tried to approach this by having persistent upgrades that will make you more powerful over time, so as you're learning the game you're also getting additional support from extra energy and credits, as well as other bonuses that will add up to make your run more likely to succeed. The rate at which you unlock these is also delicate: too fast and the game becomes too easy too quickly, too slow and you can't really see the benefits for many runs.
With all of this said, difficulty is still a problem in Mech Armada, as shown by reviews like this one:
On the other hand, people are finding the game too easy. And yes, you can increase difficulty quite a bit, so that's not really a concern.
I do believe that some amount of challenge is necessary for the game to be enjoyable, but I don't want to lock players out if they can't reach the skill floor, even after collecting persistent upgrades.
The Solution
Games like Slay the Spire don't provide an "easy" mode, and I can reach the skill floor just fine. This is not true for action games like Hades, where the first boss wrecks me easily on almost every run. Hades is a good example though, because they added an accessibility option to make the game easier for people like me.
So I'm doing something similar with Mech Armada.
In most cases players have trouble with their Mechs being destroyed too quickly. So I thought the easiest solution would be to provide an option to add extra health. This has been added in 1.01:
Once you activate this, your parts will get between 1-3 extra health points. This applies to transports and torsos, so a typical Mech can gain as many as 6 health points.
Outside of this change, 1.01 contains a few fixes and cosmetic improvements.
I'm hoping with this setting you can make it further into the game if you're stuck. Please, let me know what you think in our Discord or in the Steam forums.
/Sergio
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1389360/Mech_Armada/