So... the first three levels are now easier in the sense that they're shorter than before. But there are actually more bullets flying all over the place, so they don't feel that much easier, and the later levels are significantly harder. You can still only get hit twice before dying, and there are so many more bullets now. Not only that, but have you removed the +1 bullet upgrade? Because that's the most useful one, and I never got one with this new update.
Short version: game's definitely harder now, and I still haven't gotten to a part that made me understand why it was submitted to a bondage game jam.
Sounds like a case of really bad rng. But I calculated the chance to reach levels 1-6 without seeing any extra shot upgrades and it is higher than I'd like. I could address that by increasing the weight for those upgrades to appear in earlier levels.
| Level | Chance to never get extra shot upgrade | Odds |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 48.7% | ~1 in 2 |
| 2 | 23.7% | ~1 in 4 |
| 3 | 11.5% | ~1 in 9 |
| 4 | 5.6% | ~1 in 18 |
| 5 | 2.7% | ~1 in 37 |
| 6 | 1.3% | ~1 in 75 |
As for the difficulty, I'm a bit confused why the general player feedback went from the later levels being way too easy to now being too difficult. The only levels that were updated in this version are the first three and the bosses. Based on our analytics, players are making it 33% farther (near the end of stage 2) and abandoning runs half as much as before (from 6.9% to 3.4%).
I'd like to improve this, so if you don't mind, what do you feel is the cause of your deaths? Bad attack patterns? Web performance issues? Bad upgrade RNG making it harder to kill things? I'm working on an automated playtest system to run simulations to find these issues before we release, but it will be a while before we see results.
And yeah, we wanted to include more bondage but ran out of time. We're working on an update for that, but it might take a while since we don't have a jam deadline pressuring us anymore.
Thanks for giving the game another chance and providing feedback. It's really helpful and points me in the right direction for what to work on.