Devlog v0.20

Thank you everyone <3

So, first round of playtesting done, a couple of issues identified, and most of those iterated on. Let's take a look.

Difficulty Tweaks

I noticed that players didn't really have a moment to get used to the game's controls, and that often a new wave would spawn before they had wiped the previous one. This was not intended to happen in the early game. I increased the time of those waves by about 1.5 seconds, which should make the early game a little easier to start. I also slightly increased the time of the special wave with 4 Spinners and 4 Drain Gunnies, and made their spawns a little more separated to give a little more breathing room. 

A slightly related change is that I added a new cycle after the Mothership boss fight, which continues infinitely, instead of looping back to the wave before the boss fight. This makes the boss fight unique, and makes the endgame a little harder since those waves (at least in my own testing) do not really allow you to fully clear them before the next one comes, and the field quickly swarms with enemies.

Power-ups

I noticed, both in my own testing and in the playtests, that the Rapid Fire and Piercing Shot power-ups would often be gone for 1/3rd before they could really be used, especially when picked up right as they spawned. I increased the timing slightly to counteract this. Rapid Fire now lasts 20 seconds, and Piercing Shot 25. 

I also realized that, since the infinite cycle at the end of the game now contains a power-up spawn, and the increased chance to spawn at low lives, the Extra Lives power-up might become a bit of an issue, so I capped the amount of times a random spawn can result in an Extra Life to 2 to prevent this. 

Tutorial

This was really the big one. The game didn't have any built-in explanation as to how it worked, so for the tests I only explained what the controls were. Mostly, this worked fine, and in the longer playtest I did the player eventually figured out how all the mechanics worked. However, it was very often not clear that you could slow down/speed up time in multiple increments, and that speeding up time would replenish fuel. Reluctantly, I added this information to what the tutorial should convey.

The tutorial has now been implemented. It's an interactive one, quickly going through the controls. It has the player slow down time twice to convey that that is how it works, and the "speeding up time" part only ends when fuel has been replenished to half. I think it should work, but this really needs some more playtesting to be sure. Hopefully I can do that in the coming days. If it doesn't work, unless it's an utter disaster I'll have to push further improvements to the back of the project.

I'm... not happy with the tutorial. It should really have some enemy spawn when explaining how to shoot, and maybe some bullets to dodge when explaining how to slow time. However I was both out of time, and didn't want to have to deal with potential soft-locks or having to deal with the player dying in the tutorial. I hope it'll do for now, and I might revisit it later in the project if I have the time.

Other tweaks and changes

Someone rightfully complained about getting shot from behind the UI, so I made sure that enemies don't shoot when they're still outside the screen. This causes some slightly odd behaviour with enemies that visibly stop to shoot, but don't actually shoot, but that's acceptable for now.

I fixed a couple of UI issues, mainly that they can now actually be navigated with the gamepad (most of the time, the name input field is a problem), and a small issue where only part of a button was actually clickable.

Lastly I did some small setup work for the  Arcade, and made a temporary main menu for Time Bed to allow players to choose between playing the tutorial or not. I also wrote a partial manual, but that's not in the current version.

Up next

The plan is to spend another half day on Time Bed tomorrow, hopefully allowing me to create a sprite that is suitably bed-like, and maybe tweak/add some little things. Then, it really is time to move on to the Arcade. Plan is to make a functional barebones version of it in the coming days/weeks, and then to move on to the second game.

Oh, and the idea for the second game exists now! I'm planning on making a little arcade boat time trial racer, with classic checkpoints and timers. There might be some familiar characters in it...