Development Blog #2

To be honest, though, summers have always been slow for me, so there hasn’t been as much stuff done as I would have hoped. But still, I’ll be showing you my progress anyways!

Why it’s important to balance your game

Because, of course, an unbalanced game does not play well!

But no, seriously, I’ve been trying to balance the game for months now. Well, to be honest, I’ve been trying to balance this game since I started working on it… which has been a few years at this point?

But more recently, I made some changes to powerups that make them more balanced. (Fortunately, all of my changes make them stronger. This time.)

You may have seen some of those changes in the demo update that I recently released, but I’ll talk about them here anyways.

Making The Moon generally better in everything it does

Originally, The Moon (the powerup, not the enemies) had only 30HP and a partly 0.5 HPps recovery rate. That doesn’t sound very much here, but when you realize that that means that each moon would deal only around 15HP to planets before being destroyed, those numbers become a lot worse, actually.

The Large Moon, however, was a significant improvement to the regular Moon, with 150HP and… a 0.5 HPps recovery rate. Wait, why did I say that that was a “significant improvement”, I didn’t mean that at all!

So, what we had was a useless object that essentially dictated a wider berth around enemy planets that was only good at preventing Hamuena from spawning (once), and awarding 100 points upon its defeat.

But we already have a 100 points powerup, and for once, it doesn’t have any other negative effects associated with it! Clearly, some changes are in order.

The first thing we did was raise its max HP to 100, which is the same as The Earth. This means it can withstand a whole lot more blow (2 seconds of blow, in fact!) before being defeated. The Large Moon’s max HP was also raised, to 500HP.

We didn’t stop there, though; we also raised The Moon’s recovery rate to match The Earth’s. This not only represents a general improvement across the board, but it also makes it such that The Moon will recover differently depending on what difficulty level you’re playing at.

This now means that you have an object that you can swing into enemy planets, dealing a lot of damage… or you can keep your distance and use the moons to help shield against projectile shots. Or, of course, you could find some new mechanism that fits your playstyle, the choice is yours!

To help counteract this change, we made it such that The Moon could only be spawned from powerups, which means that The Thing will no longer spawn moons.

These changes are already in the updated demo, go check them out!

Terraformed planets

Did you know that you can terraform planets in order to make them help you? The methods that allow them to be terraformed are pretty complex and I do need to make them simpler, but that’s not for today. Instead, I wanted to address the issue that they are too weak!

The problem is, 2 of the terraformable planets, Mars and Titan, have glaring holes in their defenses that can mean that they are defeated almost immediately