I thought that I'd balanced all the weapons, ships, and enemies, but trying to make the Arcade Mode experience as seamless as possible proved me otherwise!
In the end, I'm replaying each act and then changing weapon stats, ship HP, and shields, and then trying again... and again!
Of course, I'm trying NOT to make too many major changes, as this will break Story Mode's balance for sure. So it's well... a balancing act!
As is right now, I'm pretty happy with Arcade Mode's difficulty and playability. I will still make another few runs just to be sure, and then I will get back and test the Story Mode once again to see if the recent changes broke something or not.
And talking about breaking things: while I was trying to balance the final boss fight at 3-10 (and failing), I noticed that the main reason was one pretty old bug — when hitting an enemy bullet with yours, the "bigger" one should absorb the smaller one.
This of course will be most noticeable on the bosses' projectiles, as they are indeed bigger. But for some reason, the collision logic breaks (often) and fires backwards, removing the bigger shot instead. So instead of bosses' projectiles being a major obstacle that destroys your shots (which you need to avoid), you could just shoot them out!
This bug is quite old, probably goes back a year, and I've tried to see where the issue is multiple times, but until now, I couldn't find the real issue and never fixed it.
Well, until now! I finally put in the time, wrote debug messages all over, and found and fixed the issue!
This is a major improvement to the game's logic, and of course, the experience in the boss fights! Let's hope there are no major issues like this waiting on the road to the new demo!