Thank you so much!
So, to address the QOL ideas - I agree with all of them, and have applied similar ideas to a sequel project I was working on last year called Octodrome. In brief - it was another simpret, with eleven distinct arena types, and seven unique alien species that generated warriors with unique parameters and capabilities. Maybe someday I'll upload the alpha somewhere.
However, I've had to put aside my simpret projects for the time being for three reasons. The first, being a seeming lack of interest (which you have thankfully contradicted). The second, being burnt out from spending a not insignificant amount of money on a promotional campaign that went nowhere (I ran several promotional streams, but as it turned out, most of the streamers either were unprofessional or their following didn't get the premise). The third, being that my main project, Kill Sector, has a much bigger and more sustainable following.
The team dynamic simpret concept is something I briefly dabbled with. However, I quickly found a rather difficult design and programming obstacle - that being a need to program coherent teamwork AI heuristics. The characters in Radar Theatre, Radar Colosseum, and Octodrome all work off of very similar, one-track-minded heuristics - strafe and avoid projectiles (unless a "rush" AI in Colosseum and Octo), run to and fire at the nearest enemy. In both published games, and especially in Colosseum, there are rarely situations where you'd rather do anything else. Not only that, but the AI is so simple that one can immediately understand why it'd make a tactical error - like running into an acid storm - because you know what the AI does and doesn't know. Making a team-based game where different characters have different capabilities, and thus different ideal strategies, means they'd need to individually have conditional meta-programming that builds for them a fitting AI to suit their team role. The end result would be a confusing mess - for the fighters attempting to navigate the multidimensional heuristics produced by such an architecture, for myself as the programmer trying to coordinate the fighters, and most of all for the players who cannot easily deduce the AI of all given characters. Of course, I *could* take the Theatre approach, and simply make teams of characters ignorant to their specialty, and just build the abilities to not need any special strategies to work well (believe it or not, there is zero difference in the AI of all the Theatre factions). Unlike Theatre, each team would be a motley crew of uniquely-abilitied characters working in tandem. Now, that could be interesting - and perhaps I'll explore that next time I explore the simpret design space.
If you like my work as an experimental game designer, I strongly recommend you look up Kill Sector on DrivethruRPG. It's free, we've got a swell Discord community, it has a massive design space, and I've managed to build a dev team of other folks with equally (or exceedingly) fantastical and detail-oriented imaginations to fill in that design space. Also the art is much more eye-catching than what I've got going on here - you might not believe it from Radar Theatre and Radar Colosseum, but I'm an illustrator arguably before I'm a game developer. As both an artist and an art director, I've concocted a very specific aesthetic for Kill Sector that folks thoroughly enjoy - something like an edgy middle school notebook sketch artstyle, all grown up and just as edgy.
Thank you for playing Radar Colosseum, and for taking the time to write this comment!
PS: If you're a sincere fan of the simpret genre, I strongly recommend playing through Colosseum to the point of unlocking Extreme mode. The jump from Intermediate to Advanced is notable but admittedly not as grand as the one from Basic to Intermediate, and it takes a while to unlock Extreme, so you might reason the juice isn't worth the squeeze. However, the jump from Advanced to Extreme is, well - extreme. Let's just say, despite being a one-in-six chance to guess randomly each time, I'd genuinely be beyond shocked to meet anyone who has a verifiable hit rate of greater than one in four on Extreme. There are glimpses of the new mechanisms in the trailer - but just wait until you see them in vitro.
