next step is to pick a real direction -- MMBN-like (+STS-like) or
Survivors-like -- and adapt to match. I am likely to completely remove
the energy system and use permanent autofire, freeing both fire buttons
for more interesting tasks. It loses the opportunity to create a dynamic
around baiting an enemy to keep shooting so its shields don't recover,
but I don't think it loses a lot else.
Either energy management needs to become really important and the game
becomes strategic and tactical, or it needs to be a non-issue and it is
an arcade game. Tyrian itself did not make the energy system interesting
and it was just a tax, so making it interesting would be doing something
new. But I think it's a kind of "interesting" that almost nobody would
adopt unless I go _very hard_ into creating a tactical/strategic shmup.
A shmup that is actually a strange kind of RTS sounds... really cool,
actually, but I'm not at all confident I could design it.
Removing energy entirely gives us a button _and_ a meter back, which
can be used for XP (Survivors-like) or rearm time (MMBN-like).
Instead of doing a special case for 1HP, 0HP is survivable, ships die
at negative HP instead. all ship health is adjusted to match, assuming
the weakest shot is 0.5hp, which is currently true. the "real" game will
totally rebalance all ships and weapons anyway.
we're getting close to when I have to stop dawdling and implement the
real game, the engine is _there._
it was showing the bar intended as the warning that there's no HP
under the shield. but I tried it and that bar just makes it look like
there *is* a sliver of health, which there isn't. so it's better off
without that in either mode.
some guns do less than one damage per shot (vulcan gun does 0.5), so
Instant Death Mode needs to max at 0x0.0001, the smallest nonzero value
in Pico-8's fixed-point numeric type.
One Hit Mode is just a comment for now, but I've been uncommenting it
to test it. Note that replacing the health meter with a "!" is triggered
by max HP + max shield <= 1 because 1 hp shows an empty bar.
this needs some more special cases for low-HP ships with active shields.
10s generator is too slow -- 10 seconds ago is an eternity in a shmup
and a player who has stopped firing should recover much faster. The
generator's max capacity is much lower and shield cost has been
rebalanced to match.
The Protron is much more expensive to fire, it was previously just
easy mode.
Shields now recover faster _once they start recovering_ (every second
if energy is available) but getting hit causes a "penalty cooldown"
that is much longer than the standard recovery interval. This behavior
is taken from Halo and basically every modern FPS that came after it;
it's unlike Tyrian, which had consistent shield recovery behavior.
But I think Halo's rule plays much better.
a batch change from ship to self broke the thing that kept the player on
the screen. also spawn_goodie got missed in the migration to `_ENV` for
looking up stuff by name.
Vacuum Gambit is about to stop being a Tyrian clone. The hybrid of
Mega Man Battle Network and Slay the Spire mechanics lends itself better
to Galaga than Tyrian. updatedshmup.p8 remains an excellent basis for a
Tyrian-like shmup, especially since it has a (demo of a) level loading
engine that reads strings, and maybe I'll even implement something along
those lines someday -- but I'm about to tear it all down to build it up
again, starting with the entire model for levels and progress, followed
shortly by the "energy" system and its interaction with shields.
(long-term plan: shields will auto-recover after every "flotilla", but
health will be more difficult to recover. Player shots will be limited
entirely by ammo and cooldown, replacing the "burst throughput" vs.
"sustain throughput" system created by the generator, although some
enemy firing patterns may recreate that behavior.)
(plan for the "level" system: create Galaga-style flotillas. I think
ship behaviors can reasonably be declared in the 8 bits available in
sprite flags, meaning I can program simple enemies entirely from the
sprite sheet and draw flotillas on the map.)
