itch.io

edit: as a quick note, the new title screen with random names is just for fun! the game doesn't increase in difficulty again.

haha, the logo part was a joke! just the name

thanks for taking the time to write this feedback. it's all excellent

• will definitely give the companions a health bar. probably the heart icon will shrink
• the remark about enemy variety is huge, the non-boss waves feel very samey. will start with some basic archetypes that fill the gap between "little guy" and "boss"
• > 6 enemies gets nuts! but i can ameliorate that by peppering in weaker enemies. will need to rethink the "enemy window" thing which i explain below 
• i'll probably just not drop luck items at all during the boss rush. they're also way to common in boss rush because luck is the most likely, but you can't get two of the same upgrades so it's almost always luck when only one item is dropped. that needs to be fixed.
• lastly, going to try those things for close range stuff! excited to experiment with that

"normal enemy window" is kinda weird and works like this. the game will generate 12 distinct enemies with increasing difficulty. as you progress up to the boss rush, it can pick from a moving window of 4 enemies. so level 1:

lvl 1 window:               [------------] <- randomly pick from first 4

enemies:                        0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

final level window:                                              [------------] <- randomly pick from last 4

so, if you increase the enemy count, and the window, you see a lot more variety per wave. but, it might be harder to identify enemies you've seen. which is only so helpful in practice, tbh. (during boss rush, it just picks from all 12 -- i didn't give it too much thought.)

"difficulty" is weird, and works different for each property of the generated bullet pattern. an enemy is generated with a set "difficulty", which gives the randomly chosen speed, spread, bullet size higher minimum and maximum possible values. once an enemy is generated though, they're set in stone. the issue is that an enemy has a change to basically roll 20s for all its stats. should have done something like a set amount of "skill points" to get more consistent results with how hard an enemy actually ends up being

without getting into too much detail, difficulty also increases "complexity." bullet patterns are a kind of "tree" of behavior and complexity makes it more likely that the bullet pattern tree will grow deeper. that's super vague, but simply put it makes it kind of behave more like a boss with various attack patterns. (in the settings menu, i don't think anything past 5 difficulty is very possible, lol)

the theme of the jam was procedural generation, and i think there's things that work about it and things that don't. i think folding in some more authored content while keeping some of these procedural generation systems to keep things fresh is the way to go. thanks again for spending time playing and thinking about it!