Adored this concept, but I felt like splitting the time line almost hurt the player more than it helped. Spinning in a circle on top of your original crystal seemed to be way to strong. Still, I think this concept could be expanded even more to create something really unique.
Viewing post in Lair Of The Time Crystal jam comments
Hi! Thanks for your response.
Trying to balance creating more timelines was definitely one of the harder things here, since I didn’t want players to spam the button every time it was available, but I also didn’t want them to avoid it completely. I definitely agree I balanced it too much towards the latter, but there are some features that discourage camping the crystal.
If I remember correctly, camping the crystal actually makes it impossible or at least very hard to hit some enemies once their spawn rate caps out, as the spaceship can only fire at certain angles. This might not be obvious in motion, but it’s easier to see if you head towards the center of the screen and then fire towards one of the screen corners.
The idea is that you then need to keep moving and spreading your experience gain across timelines, which then allows you to have more lasers on screen during the end game. It’s possible that the firing rate you have late game circumvents this measure when the enemies get closer to the crystal due to the width of the lasers, though.
I think a 5 minute coding fix to this problem would just be capping the firing rate buff earlier, as right now the firing rate literally caps out at how fast Scratch can run a three block loop. Oh well. Too late for that I suppose. That’s what I get for only having the menu screen complete 6 hours before the deadline! (I did set up a roadmap and mechanics list much earlier in the week, which is what allowed me to still have a working submission at all!)
Also, I’m absolutely interested in exploring this concept more! This game was originally supposed to be closer to something like Bloons Tower Defense, complete with enemy variants and graphics more complex than literal blue ovals representing enemies, but I had to give up on this once I realized I needed more coding experience. I also want to make a Roguelike that could somehow implement mechanics similar to what I have here, but again, I definitely need more coding experience first.
Thanks again for playing!