Enemy Armor
I felt that many enemies had become needlessly tedious to attack. They just soaked up too many bullets. Sure, we get the point, they’re tougher, but this is overboard. So I’ve tuned down the armor strength considerably. It’s more fun to quickly blast through many targets and feel super powerful.
Boss Battles
Boss battles needed a little love, too. Turrets are fun to pick off as a way to tear through a big ship piece by piece. Their armor was also reduced. On the other hand, boss power core strength was increased so that you can’t wipe them out quite as quickly. To compensate, however, I gave the player’s lateral blasters a 4x power upgrade to make it a worthwhile strategy against bosses. It’s fun to use multiple attack types so now you have multiple options that feel reasonably effective.
Slayer Drones
Slayer drones got some specific attention because they were pushovers. I upped their armor considerably and set them to stay on the battlefield longer. The battle with the Slayer will now challenge you to fight both the big boss and its thugs at once.
Ammo Management
Player ammo pickups dropped by damaged enemies were a little too valuable, making it actually difficult to run out of ammo. I like the challenge of resource management during combat, so I reduced this. However, I didn’t reduce it by much, since constantly running out of ammo is also no fun. Hopefully, this feels interesting as you choose when to not shoot, but not problematic so you can focus mainly on the action.
More Details
For those interested in details, you can read an itemized list of changes as well as new and old bugs that impact this version. And there may or may not be a subtle mistake somewhere in the game. (Can you spot it without the log?) See the REVO Change Log for all that info.
Is it fun?
Take REVO v0.32 out for a spin and let me know what you think of the challenge level.