Breathers
When designing the original, and then new systems, uneven pacing was not given much thought. It happened to be the case, however, that the Alpha had breaks between the action in between waves (the 'Rest Period' in the Alpha wasn't well designed, and many asked for a way to skip it).
In the current game, once the difficulty reaches a certain point, it's just frantic shooting until the final gate is lost. This results in sore arms, little to no communication in multiplayer (everyone is too busy shooting), and generally just getting burnt out of the gameplay pretty quickly.
To combat this I've implemented a new 'breather' system to the game. The enemies now come out in different densities (high or low). Each time a gate closes, it starts a high density spawning period which lasts 45 seconds, then a low density spawning period starts, lasting 20 second. After that the high density starts again and repeats that cycle.
The high density period is what the current game is 100% of the time, the low density period reduces the spawn rate by 4x in multiplayer and 2.5x in single player.
This should give everyone plenty of time to relax a bit (while still staying engaged with the game), and hopefully reduce arm fatigue as you'll be able to lower your bow for a bit without worrying you're going to lose the gate.
The numbers are completely arbitrary at the moment. 45/20 and 4x/2.5x have no spacial meaning to me, I just think they're a good starting point to test this system out.
Let me know if this improves the experience!
Other Changes
- Added a difficulty booster to let you start at a higher difficulty (if desired)
- Adjusted spawn teleporter when joining a multiplayer game in progress
- Attempted fix for another immortal gate bug