Hey!
Thanks for giving the game a shot! Its been a couple weeks since the game hit the digital shelves, so its time to talk about what the heck comes next.
TL;DR: More gun modifications, and interesting enemies.
Upgrades
Most roguelike-lite-like-esque games have various effects and abilities you combine with your weapons to create more effective, more complex weapons. Most of Sandripper's weapons come pre-complexified. Which is partly why the upgrades are so focused around improving the capabilities that the weapons start with, instead of substantially altering them. Substantial alterations are left to the workbench upgrades, of which there is currently only 1 for each of the 9 weapons (and some of them barely alter the weapon!). This lack of workbench variety paired with the long wait time to select an upgrade leaves a very noticeable gap in the performance of certain weapons.
So, Instead of making all-new weapons, more sets of workshop upgrades will be created instead. All weapons will (eventually) have 3 dramatically different modifications. Most of which change the use case of the gun completely. Since each workshop upgrade will be substantial enough, they will overwrite each other. These new mods combined with new enemies should give you plenty of synergies and strategies to play with.
Enemies
It's still early days here when it comes to designing future enemies. So I can't give you too many specifics, but I can tell you what I want.
- A new boss to mark the transition into the late game around wave 30.
- More enemies that are hard enough to allow for small group fights and 1v1s.
- Give more enemies some use to the player, like how Cylinders can bonk enemies around.
- Enemies/enemy behaviours that exploit/are exploited by certain weapons.
And something else that doesn't fit into those 2 categories would be more environmental interaction. Like the bombs scattered around the maps. Currently my only idea is to turn the archways into speed boosters, but we'll see what happens.
This will of course take a long while to complete. Especially since the second set of weapon modifications will inevitably throw off my plans for the third set. We'll see how the game evolves over time.
That's all I got for now. Thanks for reading! If you'd like to join in on discussions about the game hop in the discord: https://discord.gg/SxMJuFfgK8