Metagame: Balancing Base Power
Most games in the Survivor-Like/Horde Shooter genre have metagame systems not just to unlock more content, but also to improve your base power that you enter a run with: Some games have shops where you can trade gold for stats, others have their skill trees, and so forth. Initially, we shied away from this idea for one simple question: should you balance the game for people who have none of these power boosts, or for somebody that has all of them? If you balance the game for brand new players, then power boosts make the game too easy and more boring, but if you balance it for people with all the power boosts, then new players have little hope of beating the game; winning is more about “buying” your victory with playtime and less about your game mastery and knowledge.
Dynamic Difficulty
This outlook changed when we pivoted from being a small arena shooter to having a huge, open map. The reason was simple: We wanted areas to have differing difficulty levels. If all areas were equally difficult, there would be no sense of progression, and you could rush through the map and see all there is to see before even having played enough to understand the game's core systems. Having some areas be more difficult than others would lock off certain areas (and thus certain resources, pickups, etc) behind gaining enough strength to be able to survive those areas. While you can do a certain amount of that by counting on the player to gain strength through non-mechanical means (like game knowledge and game mastery) the strength you gain from such experience can only go so far. To have a half-dozen or more different areas, each of which is more difficult than the last, we needed to give players mechanical benefits as well! Thus, the idea of the Genetic System was born!
(Art not final and is subject to change. Especially those icons. Or... non-icons, as the case may be.)
Cloning and Genetic Enhancement
The narrative idea is simple. You’re a clone (how else could you have died so many times and still be alive?) and so in theory if your corporate overlords could take the genetic data you’re based on and improve it, each clone would be better than the previous one was. Taking inspiration from other games with slot-based bonuses, we made a screen where you can insert genes with useful bonuses into sockets in your “genetic profile”, a board that represents a given character’s genetic bonuses. These genes can give you all sorts of small buffs, comparable to the tunings you receive as you play: You could have a genetic proclivity to move faster, reload faster, shoot more accurately, deal more damage with your bullets… shoot faster… have more ammo… Okay, narratively, some of them are a bit of a stretch. But the point is, this lets you customize your stats to a certain extent before you even take your first augment.
Gene Acquisition
Where do you get these genes? At the moment, we’re still discussing this as a team. We’re pretty sure your first copy of a gene will come either as a reward from the quest board or from discovering it on the world map, like you can discover chassis blueprints. After that, additional copies of that gene can be purchased from either the research bench for resources or the arms dealer with credits.
Enhancing Genetic Potential
Beyond just the quantity of genes, you’ll also be able to upgrade the quality of your genes. This will improve the numeric bonus of the genes, letting you fit more power into less slots. Genes will provide a significant power spike early in the metagame to help you with the difficulty spike you notice moving from the Chaos Grove to the Hive Barrens, but perfecting your genes by bringing them to max quality is going to be a long term goal that we don’t expect anybody but the perfectionists to reach. Luckily, that won’t be necessary to reach and beat the most dangerous biomes, but those of you shooting for the highest level possible will appreciate the micro-optimizations.
Expanding the Genetic System
The best thing about this system is still yet to come. The genetic system gives us a solid chassis that we can use to put out even more interesting metagame progression mechanics, like Unique Genes and Gene Linking. But we’ll have to cover those topics when we talk more about our post-Early-Access content.
But don’t worry! There’s a lot more to look forward to, even in our early access release. We’ll see you in the next update with more info on new features for you to look forward to at our Early Access Launch!