Since the last post, I continued working on different things to make the Hyperslice gameplay loop more interesting and diverse.

Eliminate enemies within time frame

Similar to the countdown wave where you have to survive for X seconds, I introduced waves where you must defeat enemies under a time limit. If you manage to eliminate enemies fast enough, you get a reward (only gems for now). If you don't, enemies are killed and you move to the next wave without rewards. The goal is to have a slightly different wave, where you're encouraged to go fast and take more risks if you want a reward. If you don't feel comfortable, you can avoid enemies and just try to survive. This is a small change but combined with all the others modifiers and events that can happen, I think I'm starting to have a pretty cool loop.

Protect the payload

The other thing I introduced is the payload. My original idea was to add it randomly to waves as a secondary objective. You'd need to protect it until the end of the wave. If you manage to keep it alive until the end of the wave, it would open to reward you. The reward would depend on the life it has at the end. When testing, it proved a bit difficult to juggle both killing the enemies and protecting the payload, especially since enemies would target the payload constantly.

Before trying something completely different I implemented two things to make it more manageable. The first is the usual "projectile when pushed" which allows the payload to deal damage to enemies when pushed. This makes moving the payload around both a defensive and offensive move. The second is simply allowing you the ship to move the payload on collision. This makes it easier to adjust the position more precisely, which might be especially important for another idea 😉.

I still have to do more testing but I think these two fixes are a good solution for now, especially if I combine it with a big enough arena.

Another idea is to setup a special scene where the only goal is to protect the payload. This could be a great change of pace and I could use things I already have as threats such as missiles or lasers. This allows to focus on a more difficult protection challenge as you don't have to care about enemies.

This is not yet available in the demo build as I'm doing lots of changes at the moment, but I'll probably do a playtest soon! Stay tuned 😉

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