Hey everyone, John here! Let's talk about how we got from our demo last year to the current early access build.
To begin here's the trailer for our demo to get an idea of our starting point last year:
While we had some positive feedback my general impression of the first demo was that it was pretty generic. People liked the base mechanics but didn't engage with the upgrades very much. When we looked at the design again there were 3 things that stood out in particular:
1. The upgrades were uninteresting.
2. Using the charged shots didn't really mesh with any of the upgrades other than its own.
3. It was difficult to keep track of shield health.
For the first and second issue we went back to the drawing board on what we wanted for upgrades:
Bullet 'damage', which was more akin to bullet penetration since everything has 1 health, got the axe since it just wasn't very interesting and wasn't easy to represent visually.
Charge rate up was removed, we decided that the charged shot would now be affected by all of the upgrades like the normal shot.
Bullet speed up was not very interesting as well as not being very useful.
Shield recharge rate was just tied into the max shield increase.
Fire rate up, we wanted to increase the fire rate in a nonlinear fashion instead, we settled on a burst fire option.
Movement speed just felt a bit unwieldly, we settled on a newly implemented dodge mechanic. Here we went with thruster power but later we decided to adjust to improve the cooldown instead.
The idea behind increasing the bullet size was that it would function to block more enemy bullets giving the player some improved defense. That had a few problems, scaling with pixelated graphics wasn't trivial, the larger bullets still died in one hit, they also made it so you had to aim substantially less offensively which wasn't really the intent. We went with bullet 'flares' instead, flares are small stationary bullet that spread off of a normal bullet and block incoming projectiles (or even kill enemies). This gives an area that's relatively safer without adversely affecting your offensive options much.
Homing shots were interesting in a way but they fired independently of your main shot and also made aiming largely unnecessary which really just made the game less fun. We went with 'magnetic' bullets that push enemy bullets aside instead. This makes it easier to hit your target without reducing the number of enemy bullets on screen.
Bounce shots had the same issue of firing independently and really just didn't have an interesting effect on gameplay. You could bounce a shot off the wall and that's fun but it isn't really something that has any knock-on effects with any other abilities. We went with a similar 'ricochet' shot that simply bounces off of anything it hits including enemy ships. The idea was if you put a lot into this one then you may end up with a pinball situation. Side note this one has been somewhat difficult to implement without bugs so we're currently reworking the implementation, in the first early access release it might be a little buggy but we'll get it sorted out fairly soon.
Multi-shot more or less sticks around but now every upgrade reduces your fire rate, this is to keep the bullets per second fairly consistent since it was a huge balance issue in the demo build.
Spark Chance and Satellites stay in unchanged as does the max shield increase.
Last two are Pickup Range which is just a nice quality of life feature and Shield Explosion which was designed to facilitate more "melee" style builds.
Later during development we had a lot of issues making the charge shot relevant so we actually ended up removing it entirely. I hesitated a lot because I did really enjoy it and put a lot of work into it but it just wasn't meshing with the rest of the gameplay. We've talked about re-adding it as a new ship or in a sequel or DLC or something so we might see that at some point.
Alright now the other biggest change from the demo: Shields.
In the original demo shields were just recharging health essentially. I put in an outline shader and faded the outline opacity in accordance with the remaining shield percentage but players generally didn't notice that at all and having to look down at the bottom of the screen for a number was tedious and not something players did. We found they often had no idea how much health they had left.
At this time we was also just trying to make the game more interesting in general and trying to encourage the player to move around and be more active. I've always loved those sci-fi segmented hexagonal shields and decided to spend some time making a large visible segmented shield for the player, reducing their health to be 1, consistent with all the other ships and bullets in the game.
That was easier said than done and in the end I had this monstrous shader:
I'm not a graphics programmer so I'm sure it could be done better but you have to stop somewhere and we had a lot of other features to implement.
Another thing we decided on some months ago was to move from our demo's "enemies are always on screen until they die" situation to enemies moving on and off-screen. This was mainly because enemies would start stacking up if you weren't doing well and became extremely unforgiving. This also allowed for slightly more interesting movement patterns because they weren't required to circle back to their starting point.
Alright I think that's enough for this post, I could go on about more details but these are the major changes that happened and the main reason we ended up delaying our original intended release of February to June. We still have a lot of work to do but hopefully we can do that better by getting feedback from players directly via early access.
Thanks so much for reading!