Hi everyone! I decided to push the game to Steam after the jam - why not? The paid entry was just sitting there, and now there’s at least some kind of game, so I should give it a try.

And while Steam was reviewing the store page, I rewrote the lion’s share of the project, because for the jam everything was, as usual, done quickly and haphazardly, with no intention to expand it.

By the way, here’s the Steam page, wishlist it - I’d appreciate it! The plan is to open Early Access on October 1. I’ve lined up quite a few changes for that. I don’t know if I’ll make it in time, but I’m putting in all my effort.

So, the changes: at this point, mobs can already pick up and combine abilities; there are only four so far, but now it’s much easier to tune the difficulty level. Oh, right! You can sprinkle these abilities with telegraphs so the player knows when something bad is about to happen:

For example, this one shows an exclamation mark before a rush. I might change it later to something more showy, but I feel overloading the screen isn’t the best idea either.

Since the gameplay is simple, I want to preserve the most pleasant feel of the process - basically, so it’s simply satisfying to shoot these mobs and mow them down in batches. I feel that the more pleasant and tactile it is to poke at the mobs, the more enjoyment you can get from the game. I’m currently working on this feeling during gameplay.

There’s also a shooting ability that plays nicely with the previous one, but this time I flicker the telegraph before the shot. That way the player can understand which attack will follow.

And here’s another gnarly ability of the suicide mobs. I put two examples into one gif: in the first they hit without a rush, in the second with a rush, which is much more dangerous.

It seems that for gameplay against mobs like these, it wouldn’t hurt to add a dash for the player. Maybe it would even be more fun to make several characters with different abilities you can play as - after unlocking them first, of course.

Alright, moving on to bosses. Here I implemented several phases for bosses as well as combinations of abilities. Here’s a slightly more dangerous variant of the first-version boss with two phases:

Yes, the difficulty here has become much more interesting; I’ll probably put together a playable build next time - for now it’s all a work in progress.

I’m also thinking of adding a roulette at the boss stage, so it’s not so easy when you’ve built a top build, beat up defenseless mobs, and think you’ll beat the boss the same way - but then the build suddenly changes via the roulette. That is, we’ll shuffle through the words you’ve already unlocked and you’ll get some kind of build for fighting the boss. This should make the games harder and bring some joy, most likely.