The Upgrade Menu. After all these centuries!
I had the beginnings of this from almost the start of this game development over a year ago now, but I just now got to finally implementing it properly. I plan to have a fair few more upgrades available later on, but I think these will serve as a good start. I have two types of upgrades, the ones that use monsters you capture and give higher upgrades depending on the tier of the compatible monster and MODS.
Mods can be upgraded via mod points you find by exploring, capturing some of the more difficult monsters etc. The plan is to make at least most of the mods to not have a cap on how many mod points you can invest, so you can use all of them on a single mod even, if you are of the extremely min-maxed mindset. We'll sea how that shakes out in the end.
The upgrade menu as of now:
It fades out and let's you select a monster from your captured monster collection for upgrades. In this example I need to select a monster with the tag EVOLVING tag and I had used up all higher tier ones already so I selected one of the same tier just to show how it looks:
The menu seams pretty simple but of course there are tons of non obvious little problems I've been working out. How to intuitively show which monsters are available, how to sort the various extra smaller menus that pop up, how to change the monster, how to convey sometimes a bit complicated explanations, how to turn off the skill if it doesn't suit your playstyle etc. I think now it works fairly well, but I look forward to releasing the working demo "fairly soon" and seeing some feedback.
Here are the explanations of other basic upgrades I implemented:
And also here we have a MOD that potentially changes the gameplay quite a lot :
It allows you to play much more aggressively and still capture some monster at the expense of HP. Also it has a nice synergy with the HP Multiplier Upgrade, as that one heals you when you capture a monster. As I mentioned, mods, including this one don't have a skill cap so you can easily go into negative base HP. This is not an automatic loss, because other upgrades and permanent HP increases found by shooting at monsters a lot, can pull you out of the negative numbers. However, this is the only mod I have without any cost added if you want to downgrade it and retrieve a mod level( and reduce the HP debuf in this case). Otherwise you might soft-lock yourself and die as soon as you enter a cave area wit less than zero HP.
Lastly, I made one more monster based upgrade( Lightning Ring) and two other mods( Lightning Proliferation and Chaotic Lasering) that serve as upgrades and changes to your weapons and they have more visuals I want to show off. I'll ramble about those later, but I think they are turning out quite fun so far, possibly a bit ridiculous.