Hello again! Welcome to my second development blog! It’s only been around… 2 months? since my last development blog, so I’d thought I’d give an update on how things are going.
To be honest, though, summers have always been slow for me, so there hasn’t been as much stuff done as I would have hoped. But still, I’ll be showing you my progress anyways!
Why it’s important to balance your game
Because, of course, an unbalanced game does not play well!
But no, seriously, I’ve been trying to balance the game for months now. Well, to be honest, I’ve been trying to balance this game since I started working on it… which has been a few years at this point?
But more recently, I made some changes to powerups that make them more balanced. (Fortunately, all of my changes make them stronger. This time.)
You may have seen some of those changes in the demo update that I recently released, but I’ll talk about them here anyways.
Making The Moon generally better in everything it does
Originally, The Moon (the powerup, not the enemies) had only 30HP and a partly 0.5 HPps recovery rate. That doesn’t sound very much here, but when you realize that that means that each moon would deal only around 15HP to planets before being destroyed, those numbers become a lot worse, actually.
The Large Moon, however, was a significant improvement to the regular Moon, with 150HP and… a 0.5 HPps recovery rate. Wait, why did I say that that was a “significant improvement”, I didn’t mean that at all!
So, what we had was a useless object that essentially dictated a wider berth around enemy planets that was only good at preventing Hamuena from spawning (once), and awarding 100 points upon its defeat.
But we already have a 100 points powerup, and for once, it doesn’t have any other negative effects associated with it! Clearly, some changes are in order.
The first thing we did was raise its max HP to 100, which is the same as The Earth. This means it can withstand a whole lot more blow (2 seconds of blow, in fact!) before being defeated. The Large Moon’s max HP was also raised, to 500HP.
We didn’t stop there, though; we also raised The Moon’s recovery rate to match The Earth’s. This not only represents a general improvement across the board, but it also makes it such that The Moon will recover differently depending on what difficulty level you’re playing at.
This now means that you have an object that you can swing into enemy planets, dealing a lot of damage… or you can keep your distance and use the moons to help shield against projectile shots. Or, of course, you could find some new mechanism that fits your playstyle, the choice is yours!
To help counteract this change, we made it such that The Moon could only be spawned from powerups, which means that The Thing will no longer spawn moons.
These changes are already in the updated demo, go check them out!
Terraformed planets
Did you know that you can terraform planets in order to make them help you? The methods that allow them to be terraformed are pretty complex and I do need to make them simpler, but that’s not for today. Instead, I wanted to address the issue that they are too weak!
The problem is, 2 of the terraformable planets, Mars and Titan, have glaring holes in their defenses that can mean that they are defeated almost immediately after being terraformed. (Ganymede, fortunately, does not have this problem.) Since terraforming planets can be quite expensive, this will not do!
One of their biggest problems is that they can be ripped apart by water projectiles, which actually leads right into our next section…
Making Water less like Wipeout
In its current form, each water projectile deals 2HP of damage to any planet that it hits, with a few exceptions. While this may not sound like much, planets such as Europa and Callisto can shoot up to 300 projectiles at a time, which means that this is the end result if you’re not careful…
(Sometimes? ONLY sometimes?)
This applies to not only Earth, but (almost) every other planet, enemy or not.
But we have a powerup for that! It’s called Wipeout, and it doesn’t even damage your allies!
So we nerfed water by making it deal only 0.2HP of damage. Now, while planets can still be defeated by water (especially if their health is already low), water is more likely to deal just a “splash” of damage. This means that Europa and Callisto won’t clear the board, yourself included.
Some other tweaks
The Wipeout powerup, however, is supposed to clear the board. However, when Heat-seeking shot was active, then all of those wipeout shots would automatically seek toward the nearest enemy planet. This didn’t look real good, so we made it such that heat-seeking was disabled during the duration of the wipeout.
Full Health is also a good powerup to get (especially when your health is running low!) However, when Golden Health was active, then Full Health would not heal The Earth at all. This was changed such that Full Health would heal The Earth by 100HP no matter what (bounded by max health), just like what Needy Health does when it is activated. As a small bonus, this means that terraformed planets will now be healed by Full Health as well.
Thank you for making it this far!
It means a lot to me that you took all of this time to read whatever I felt like writing here. It would also mean a lot to me if you would wishlist this game on Steam!
Until next time!
-Andrew