Replayed it to make sure, and as i've thought (but wasn't sure) the powerups bought stay even eafter you fail, that's a nice gameplay loop :)
The only thing i'd mention is the amount of enemies that spawn, sometimes is impossible to keep them at bay until you get at least one gost. Maybe increasing the spawn rate over time until it reaches the current spawn speed would help with that? Not too sure about that though.
I really enjoyed playing it, cheers! :D
Viewing post in The Road to Hell jam comments
The Holo Helpers, yeah, broken :P. That combined with he RNG element of their spawning.
I tried balancing things but ran out of time to implement more control over that. Probably spent too much time polishing things like the menu screens and plot/dialogue sections :P.
Thanks for playing, glad you enjoyed it :)
You're welcome :)
If interested I'd like to give you some suggestions (i'd pick one of them, but you could try a mix n' match and see how it works out):
-Have one Holo helper to spawn if you don't die in the first 5 to 10 seconds. Maybe one near the start could suffice in let's say the first 10 seconds.
-A single time upgrade (can be bought only once) that's a bit more expensive than the rest but grants you one Holo helper on level's start. Or cheaper but you need to buy it on every level if you wanted it.
-The rate of spawn modified so it ramps up over time. Let's say the spawn speed/rate for level 5 is 5 units. Make it so it increases over time from 2-(LevelIndex) so in this case it'd start at 3 and speeds up to 5.
I hope these help, cheers :)
Oh yeah I had a few ideas on all this, just ran out of time to implement any of them.
I should have balanced it so the less holo helpers you have the more Green power ups spawn, and the more you have, the more Red cancel them out ones. Would have been a lot better. Probably wouldn't have been to much work, but I got stuck polishing up menus and story and getting the WebGL version to work on itch properly.
Could have had the option to buy them in the shop, with a follow up option to upgrade them (so they start as the player does at level 1, and you have to also pay to upgrade their levels. Maybe have a cap on how many you can have via this, that costs a lot to upgrade.
Maybe have them only last for 10-20 seconds, thus stopping the over powered thing that happens when you have 4 (I started with 8 of them before testing :P).
So yeah, think we're on similar pages with it :), just wish I had one more day :P, or the ability to let some of the other stuff be a little less nice :P.