RADICAL YES WEEEEEEEEE
I bet the third weapon involves incredibly weak homing missiles or something. 
Close! I am definitely thinking rockets, but not homing ones, since automated homing would probably just interfere with gameplay. And rather than being incredibly weak, i'm thinking they should be few and strong, with possible AoE to boot. Piercing shots would obviously be excluded from rockets (unless... SHAPED CHARGES IN SPACE), but they'd get some other equally powerful benefit instead (such as the mentioned AoE, or a boost to it).
What i am also thinking, however, is a FOURTH weapon, good old machine guns! Weak bullets, but fast rate of fire. Their special property would probably be something like ricochetting, except with a bias towards the nearest enemy, so it's more likely to hit multiple targets than just straight piercing. (but it still causes the same kind of damage)
And speaking of that, i've applied a nerf to piercing now, since it was hideously powerful before (practically a flat damage multiplier against multiple targets). Now it deals reduced damage for each enemy pierced, which at the moment means 50% damage to the second target, and 33% to the potential third target (wink wink). Still a powerful property, but not QUITE as much of a game breaker, since the potential damage has been reduced from 300% to 183% (which, mind you, is still a LOT). Yes, that means the final upgrade for the default lasers will be a piercing upgrade.
ALSO, the beam is working excellently now, and i've made a script that makes it far more easy to add more shot types, so with some luck things might speed up from here. Still need to finish up the third boss, but i think Chartle is up for that challenge once i get off my ass and sprite the rest of the things. (note to self: discuss more things with Chartle before randomly blurting them out)
What i personally also like about the beams is that they have a special piercing mechanic. On the rocks, they will only hit multiple enemies if you deal more damage than they have health, so if you say hit a Wedge (first enemy you meet) with a 30 damage beam, its 20 health will be subtracted from the beams power (and the Wedge will die horribly, ruining any chances of going home and being a family man), and the remaining 10 damage will continue through and potentially hit a second target. HOWEVER! With piercing upgrades, the amount of power subtracted from the beam will be reduced by an amount proportional to the level of piercing, which means that you can potentially shoot through squishy ships without destroying them, and hurting subsequent ships more. Example:
Your beam deals 15 damage, and you have level 2 piercing (beams start at 1). You shoot at a Wedge. The Wedge, having 20 health, does not die, but the beam only loses [20 health/2 piercing = 10 power] from its pool, meaning that 5 damage will continue on to the next ship. This means that, in theory, a 15 damage beam with level 3 piercing could hit 3 wedges at once, although the third one wouldn't take much damage.
Now obviously, this works much better with powerful shots, so the beam weapons are probably the hardest hitting of the lot, but also the slowest firing. To make up for that, i'm going to need some seriously sweet effects to take the players mind off of the lessened dakka.
Also yes, all weapons will be affected by spread shot, so you can have a delicious fan of piercing beams, or a raging storm of machine gun fire, or a rocket clusterfuck, or whatever. Or maybe two of those at once, because i've been thinking about making it possible to choose weapons for turret and front guns separately, since that'd be pretty rad, and also entirely possible since all variables about turret and front are already separate things. Customization is a good thing, you know?
now to get beams working on the fucking reflectors, augh
also possibly some menu additions for the coming goodness AUGH
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Topic: Angry Laser Space - v1.1 is a go! (a game by Shook and Chartle) (Read 57866 times)