itch.io

>have you noticed the buffs that spawn out of holes and have they been useful for defeating it?

I was mainly using them to heal myself, and not for the actual buffs.

As for the mid fight editing. On one hand I had great experience with it as I already told you, but on another I think jumping to editing at any time could be abused, and most importantly would end up breaking the flow of the game. I only used it twice in combat, but I can imagine some people could e.g. have all mobility parts, get closer to an enemy and switch to all weapons. That would result in some "power gaming strategies", but would mean constant switching between action, and pausing the game to make adjustments.

Here are some of my ideas:

• Probably the simplest "solution" would be to give less currency whenever some part is sold. That way it would allow players to change positioning of their already acquired parts, but penalize them for selling and buying different ones.
• Another potential solution could be to have all the changes not to be applied instantly. You already have the system for regeneration, so you could make it that player must plan some sort of progression blue print for the next x amount of parts, and would grow based on that blue print whenever more resources are collected.
• Another potential solution is to have limited number of edits that can be used in combat. It could either be one combat edit per level, or maybe have combat edits as some sort of collectible power up.
• Another idea is to always have two different monster designs that can be changed with one key, but only allow the two designs to have only few changes based on zooids cost. That way players would be able to quickly switch from e.g. attack to running away without breaking the flow. You could have some nice, quick animation for different zooids ungrowing and regrowing.
• My last idea is to just have a cap on how many changes you can make per level. So let's say players are only able to edit their monster 3 times per level. They can edit mid battle if they want, but that would mean less out of battle editing for their planned build.

So yeah, that's something to think about. I think coming up with solutions for things like that is one of the best parts of game development. It's creative problem solving.

Let me know what you think about my suggestions. It is probably going to take some time to digest everything, and maybe test some things to see what would work best with your vision. I look forward to your reply.