Posted December 20, 2025 by CinderousWorks
TL;DR: Bounty System (Roguelike "Runs"), enemy behavior rewrite resulting in new enemies, check it out here!
Another exciting update this week; the first iteration of the Bounty System and two new enemies designed from the ground up using a new state machine. Let's talk about bounties first.
Bounties are the quests, missions, or whatever you'd like to call them of this game. A bounty also represents a "run" in the roguelike context. Dying ends your bounty/run, reaching the end and finishing the goal completes it.
A bounty consists of a target; Gary in this case, a difficulty, a reward (in money) and a starter kit to get you going which is show on the right.
In your ship you have a familiar looking computer with a new function - selecting your current bounty. If you don't already have one active you'll be presented with three options, which for now are just targets to kill but will expand to other types in the future. Select one to enable the star map, which now lives in the navigation console:
I won't be as detailed with the enemies as I think there is a bit of a fun factor to surprises there, but I will say all three original enemies were removed and replaced with two brand new kinds. These new enemies use my original sprites and actually telegraph their moves. I originally had them written in a strategy pattern for the game jam, but that quickly became a mess, so part of this update was rewriting them to use a state machine which was the bulk of my work this week but I've ended up with something I think will be rock solid throughout the development of this game allowing me to inject behavior via scripts anywhere I'd like. I have a lot more work to do with enemies including tweaking their numbers/behaviors and giving them more but I'm really happy with this foundation. I'm also happy to announce this starts my ~2 week break from work, so that hopefully means some juicy updates before the year end! Enjoy the update, and let me know what you think here or on https://bsky.app/profile/cinderous.bsky.social