Posted October 05, 2022 by fortythreesam
The idea tried to come up with a balance between something happening too often or too slow. The main inspiration came from vampire survivors and the end game of rogue-lites such as binding of Isaac. It's basically a rapid progression to the endgame state. From there it was just about creating a theme and setting for it and go from there.
The main challenge for this was creating the wave system and the upgrades system. The waves are managed by having a set number of each enemy type and maintaining that amount whenever any enemy is defeated. The wave manager then spawns the enemies in a circle around the player off screen. Any on screen enemy that ends up off screen is re-positioned to be somewhere else around the player to prevent all enemies from ending up on one side of the player.
The upgrades are all just classes that have an apply function that takes the player as an argument. They then update stats, add weapon scenes as child nodes like the lightning emitter, and find certain child nodes like the staff to upgrade properties such as damage and fire rate.
I've learned a lot about structuring these types of games in a way that allowed for me to easily modify the progression of both the player and the waves. It was fun trying to find a balance between the two and play testing each iteration. I think the balance could still be improved but it's grand for a game to play through once or twice and just enjoy. I think they way I implemented the upgrade system will be how I implement in for all future games that need something similar as it allowed for a large variety of changes to be made with pretty modular code.
In the end I'm super happy with how the game turned out. It's fun to play through for me which is always the main goal with game jam games I make. I don't think I will develop it much further from here despite having a few things that I never got around to like a final boss.