Important aside: Reflecting on playtesting so far, there’s a glaring problem in that there’s no penalty for dying. A lot of people view lives as outdated, but not having a hard reset point means that the short length of this game will be glaring, since players would just brute force the game.
Thus, the working solution for now is a credit system. Copypasted from my code comments:
(This also means I’m implementing a score system)
This works as a happy medium between the two; players that endlessly die are punished, but not barred from continuing play, just the final level (think something like how Touhou manages continues).
Besides solving the player-punishment problem, this allows me to introduce a “speed up” ability that I was originally planning on as a stage gimmick, except as a dedicated unlockable mechanic to both reward riskier play and make repeated playthroughs quicker (plus if they mastered the later levels, they can just p***take the earlier ones, since credits don’t dip into the negatives).
Most importantly, in order to mitigate scope creep and make scaling credit spending feasible, this decision gives me a definitive stage quantity. I can now roadmap updates based on some definitive theme/goal (similar to how this one is the “stage 1 playable” goal, next one can be the “UI feedback” update or similar). I have a rough roadmap for this planned, but I won’t dump it until the next post.
Unfortunately, I can’t fully implement this system yet until level transitions are finalized, but I can start doing things like adding in distance-based and boss-credits.
Note to self for later: 1 2 3 4 5 6 2 2 3 4 5 6 6 3 3 3 5 5 5