The Difficulty Update

New Art: New art made by me using a modified version of the PICO-8 palette. This is hopefully not the final artwork (and many items have not been updated), but hopefully will remain the art style for the next few months.

Changed Turret Firing Pattern: Previously, turrets would fire at fixed intervals, the idea being that by waiting for them to fire, and moving in afterwards, the player could get in easy shots. I want every enemy, as much as possible, to react to player behavior, both so that the player is required to outsmart the enemy, and so that the enemy feels reactive, and a standard timer isn't reactive.. To help this, the turrets now fire a small burst whenever they have line of sight with the player, before entering a cooldown where they can't fire at all. This allows the player to juke the turret intentionally, creating their own window of attack. To compensate for the added difficulty, the bullet speed, number of bullets, and duration of the burst have been drastically decreased

Player Respawns on Crashing: Crashing into walls was probably the single largest frustration I noticed from playtests. Players felt that crashing was far too punishing, and to me it seemed awkward to take a hit and then just keep falling, likely into a bullet or another wall. As a result, whenever the player hits a wall, all bullets are cleared from the screen, and the player respawns, and the game freezes until the player gives a new directional input. This is meant to make crashing feel more impactful, while also providing the player with a rest if they do crash, allowing them to gather themselves, reassess, and try again. Currently the player can spawn inside of an enemy, which is bad. This will be fixed eventually hopefully.

Half/Quarter Tile Obstacles: Another way to help reduce crashes in early levels is to give the player more open space. The nature of this game is such that the obstacles the player needs to dodge double as the cover they need to hide behind, so simply reducing obstacles would be tricky without making the space too open. A way to subtly widen the corridors the player needs to navigate is by having obstacles that are thinner than before, taking up only half a tile. These allow me to create levels that have the same amount of cover as before, but with much wider passages for players. 

Easy/Hard Levels: There are now 6 total maps in the game, 3 easy and 3 hard. The top 2 rows contain the easy maps, and the bottom 2 contain the harder maps. Both make use of the new half tiles extensively, though the hard maps should be even trickier than the map in the previous version. Level design is still something I'm heavily experimenting with. Let me know if a level feels too easy or too hard, and what parts of the level specifically seem to be giving you trouble/are uninteresting.

Health Resets Between Levels: To help make the game more forgiving, especially during playtests where I need players to reach the ending levels, health now resets between levels. Buying a health upgrade now increases max health. In a near future update the price of maximum health will be increased significantly. There are likely to be bugs with this, please find them.

Practice Stage: Most players are very unfamiliar with Lunar Lander style movement at all, and even those who are will be unfamiliar with the specific movement and physics in this game. To help players get adjusted in a stress free environment, there is now a practice level with no enemies and infinite lives!