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[IndigoFenix]

So, played a bit further (up to level 19).  Some balancing issues and potential solutions.

The worm things (Leviathans I think) are especially troublesome for several reasons:
1. They kill you in one hit.
2. They have a small weak point that is only open for short periods of time each "pass".  This is fine for a boss or an enemy that shows up by itself, but in the middle of a level with a ton of other things going on, you have to be focusing on them rather than watching your own ship and dodging nearby bullets, making you vulnerable to other enemies.
3. You are pretty much forced to go on the offensive, because they stick around for a really long time until killed.
4. When off-screen, they can come from anywhere on the side of the screen they disappeared.  That means that entire side of the screen is "unsafe".  If you aren't paying attention to where they are (for example, due to focusing on the abundance of attacks coming at you from every direction), you are pretty much forced to stay in the middle of the screen - a tall order when there is a ton of other stuff to dodge.
5. Their randomness means you can't learn their patterns; every time you play a level they will reappear in different places.

They are by far the biggest cause of death for me in later levels, either directly or being killed by other things while trying to focus on them.  Any one of these qualities, if taken away, would make them a lot less troublesome; as they are they completely change the playing field whenever they show up, and not for the better.  My suggestion would be to make them always reappear at the top of the screen; this would solve problem 4 and take some of the edge off of problem 2 since it is easier to hit their weak point with the main weapons when they are moving downwards.

The large laser ships are also annoying especially when there is other stuff to pay attention to, but these can be improved more easily I think.  Since the main cause of getting shot by them is playing defensively (focusing on your own ship and avoiding nearby bullets rather than ships capable of one-shot sniping you from across the screen) showing a narrow "warning beam" effect over the area the laser will fire before the actual damaging laser fires can warn the player to move away.

[Shook]

Much appreciated! I shall respond in order:

Were leviathans not an end game enemy, i would absolutely have nerfed them, but as it stands, they exist to keep even a fully upgraded player on their toes. It might seem like they're random, but they're actually not; they reappear on the same side of the screen that they exited, but mirrored on the perpendicular axis. So, if it exits at bottom left, it reappears at bottom right. Probably not terribly intuitive, but that's how it is. :v (i imagine it as them looping around off screen, basically)
The levels are generally designed to give you a bit of a breather when they first show up, so you have an opportunity to bring them down without too much trouble from other enemies (with stage 19 being a notable exception at the end), but if you fail to kill them in time, shit will heat up. It's worth noting that the green ones are relatively easily brought down by super shots, most easily accomplished with the turret (especially a spread super from the turret will one-shot them at point blank range), and breaking their segments also lowers the health of the head (and also shields don't mitigate super shots at all).

As for the giant beam ships (Despoilers), they actually get exactly that kind of forewarning when you get the sensor upgrade in the defensive skill line, along with a longer "ring" warning. Said upgrade also provides a little ping where leviathans will reappear, so it's actually quite useful. :v

Similarly in the defense skills, the very last upgrade actually makes it possible to survive both Despoiler beams and Leviathan rams (both attacks normally ignore all your defenses to damage hull directly, the skill makes them apply at half strength), but i suppose one thing that could be changed is to make Leviathan rams not be automatically fatal without said upgrade, but rather have a high base damage like the beams (which deal 95 damage on Normal). I'm gotta note this down; if the Leviathans turn out to be a common target for balancing complaints, i will of course change it.

[IndigoFenix]

Ohh, okay.  Well I don't have enough skill points for those, which may be related to the fact that I didn't actually figure out how to use skill points until about halfway through the game which may have negatively affected my total EXP accumulation .  I guess I'll have to start over to get any further.

[Shook]

Mayhaps. :v
Probably my fault for not making it more obvious, but at this point i can't be arsed to do any non-essential work on it. It's worth noting that the end-game is balanced after me having 14 skillpoints to deal with the final boss on Nightmare, so getting less than 8 is probably going to impact your performance, yes.

Also, VERY minor update today, fixed a few nitpicks that were basically just things i forgot to change in the text. However, there's a shiny new download link, courtesy of itch.io!

https://hatfishgames.itch.io/angry-laser-space

This also eases eventual donations, if people should feel inclined, but please don't feel pressured.

[IndigoFenix]

Okay!  So I finished the game and here's my review, and one big suggestion (as well as a few small ones):

First off, the bugs:
Occasional crashes due to "Galaxy: trying to draw nonexistent sprites" or something similar.
Rare "Zombie ships", or that's what I'm calling them; on occasion an enemy will spawn shaking and dark (possibly in the process of exploding) but will actually be invincible.  I have seen this with several kinds of enemies and could find no pattern, though it seemed most common around level 5 I think.

With that out of the way...

I have never really given much thought to why a game should have limited lives, but after playing through this a couple of times I couldn't help but think that giving the player limited lives would actually improve the game.  Here's why:

As mentioned before, my first playthrough left me drastically underleveled near the endgame, but even on subsequent playthroughs I found the game's difficulty to be very sensitive to my actual upgrade level vs. "expected" upgrade level.  There is of course some skill involved but basically I found that if I died more than 2 or 3 times in any single stage I was ultimately going to get stuck on stage 19.  If you're on a decent level, the challenge stops being surviving the stage and instead becomes getting as many kills as possible - ensuring that you are on a high enough level to turn the next stages from "survive" to "shooting gallery".  My first playthrough got me stuck on stage 19 for 2 hours before I gave up.  In my fifth game - the first time I had reached the top of the offensive skill tree - I beat it on my third try, and the final boss was also a breeze.  Took about a half hour - a typical timespan for a single winning run of an old-school arcade game.

What does this have to do with limited lives?  Basically because if you are in a position to potentially win, you won't be dying very much, and if you are dying a lot, your best option is to start over and improve your skills at leveling up in the earlier levels - but most players won't do this, since it's unintuitive.  Giving the player limited lives means that rather than trying over and over again to beat a stage and growing frustrated, the player is constantly returning to the start and improving their skills at racking up a high score, preparing them for the challenges ahead.  It would also feel a lot more of an accomplishment to finally win after being "forced" to restart several times, after truly mastering each level rather than simply brute-forcing your way through them one at a time (assuming one has the patience to do so).  You don't get that often in modern games but it's one of the things that made old arcade-style games memorable.

Also, if there are limited lives you can buy them in the store, which would give you something to do with money near the end of the game, and being forced to restart regularly means the player will probably be trying out different combinations of weapons more often, which is cool.  And would also be cool to reduce your life count in harder difficulty settings.  Final difficulty: one hit, one life.  Lol.

Stage 19 is a bit of a weird roadblock, due to the fact that the main threat are the things that can one-shot you regardless of level (Stage 18 has shades of this as well), but what I found was that if you're at a high enough level everything else becomes much less threatening so you're able to concentrate on the Leviathans and Despoilers (a healthy supply of supers also helps).  At a high level the stage still feels challenging, but it is fun-challenging not frustrating-challenging.  (I still think enemies that can one-shot you from offscreen are rather problematic from a game design perspective; also even though they are technically not random few players are likely to guess their pattern just from observation.)

I think I should also point out that since the game's difficulty relies so heavily on your level, it seems to me that building offense is much better than building defense.  I didn't win until I basically maxed out everything on the left side of the upgrade screen while ignoring all but the most basic right-screen upgrades.  (The best defense is EXPLODING EVERYTHING.)  Maybe there's an alternate way of playing but I'm not seeing it.

I didn't see any pings from the Leviathans with the sensor upgrade by the way.  I did see the exclamation marks from red wedges and the beams from Despoilers.  I do think it's a bit underwhelming for such a high-level upgrade.  Maybe have its effects on by default (red wedges, while not especially threatening, feel cheap when you can't predict them) and replace that upgrade with something else?  Maybe something that lets you heal or gain power by destroying enemies.

[Shook]

Ooo, more feedback, many thanks! Response in chronological order:

Crashes: Fuck, i thought i had eliminated those. Probably gonna have to fix that. :I
Zombie ships: Hee, you've just run into the apeshit coefficient. They're not invincible, just 5 times as tough (and valuable!) as their non-apeshit cousins. More specifically, by default, every enemy (EVERY.) have a 1 in 10000 chance of going apeshit, which, along with the aforementioned toughness boost, tends to make them move/fire a lot faster. You can turn it off if you wish; just open Config.ini with notepad and set Apeshit to 0. I made this feature precisely to elicit "wut" responses, although i can see that it could prove slightly inconvenient in some cases (i know my brother got surprised by an apeshit red sentry in stage 19, which amused me).

As for the limited lives thing, that's actually a very good point, i've been wondering how to ensure that people wouldn't be underpowered to deal with the end game. Biggest issue is probably that people could return to the shop at will during normal play, but i guess having spent lives NOT return due to this would mostly solve that issue (besides people who bail just before getting murderized). Might actually add this, although i'm not sure i could cram a "buy moar lief" button into the already crowded shop. We'll see. :V

And yeah, offense generally seems to be the more effective route, but that's how it almost always is IF you can avoid getting hit. I actually found that the final boss was easier with maxed defense than maxed offense, probably due to how powerful the final upgrade of the ladder is (+15% armour is a LOT when you already have 45%, along with resistance to defense-bypassing attacks); even if your DPS isn't as high, you can much more easily survive to deal out your DPS for a longer time. Case in point, if you have maxed defense and an active shield, you can survive a Despoiler shot on Nightmare, and since it makes Leviathan ram attacks scale with its health as opposed to an instant kill, it also makes it possible to come out on top in a collision if it's damaged enough. That besides, since you can take a bigger beating with defense, the danger bonus can get higher.

Regarding the sensor upgrade blips, they're just a couple of expanding circles blipping at the edge of the screen, so they're probably a bit too easy to miss (which i'll have to rectify). As for replacing the upgrade... Maybe? I kinda want there to be a price for playing fully offensively; you can make things dead good, but you have to compensate for the deficits yourself. The entire point of red wedges is to make the sides dangerous, because otherwise that's easily the safest place on the screen until leviathans show up. I suppose it is a bit unfair, limiting the playing field like that, but the alternative is that you can't shoot them before they make their move (which you can at the moment). I'll definitely consider it!

[IndigoFenix]

The crashes mostly happened after I had died many times in a row, but I'm not sure if there is a connection or if it's just that most of the time I started a level it was after dying many times in a row.

Regarding offense vs defense, I meant that if you go defense, it's a lot harder to level up at all, since leveling (both in cash and skill points) seems to be based on enemies killed unless I missed something.  How does the Danger Bonus work exactly?  Can you gain skill points by tanking hits?

As for lives, I'd guess that if you start out with 5 lives and gain 1 extra life automatically every time you gain a skill point, and then replacing the main upgrade shop with an entirely new shop that sells lives (expensively) once the player has bought all the upgrades (and therefore has no more use for money), the game should be just balanced enough for an average player.  (Assuming that I am an average player. )

To keep players from bailing right before losing a life, you could make the game save when a level starts - with one life removed, to be "refunded" when they beat the level.  If they restart, the game assumes they lost.  That should prevent save-scumming (which, given the reasons above, would actually make the game less frustrating).  It's a short game, it doesn't really need a save function anyway.

[Shook]

The crashes mostly happened after I had died many times in a row, but I'm not sure if there is a connection or if it's just that most of the time I started a level it was after dying many times in a row.

Welp, probably related to stage (re)start then. Gonna have to see if i really didn't make some kind of failsafe for that. :V

Regarding offense vs defense, I meant that if you go defense, it's a lot harder to level up at all, since leveling (both in cash and skill points) seems to be based on enemies killed unless I missed something.  How does the Danger Bonus work exactly?  Can you gain skill points by tanking hits?

True, although worth noting is that if you put points into defense, you can skip early defense upgrades for the most part. The danger bonus is pretty simple; $2 gained per 1 damage you or your shield takes, including fractions, but rounded off in the end (because fuck cash decimals); no points or experience gained (though letting it give XP might actually be a good equalizer). It's capped based on your hull and defensive upgrades; initially capped at $200 for somehow not dying while losing all your health, it then goes on to include armour, regeneration (i think) and shield. It gets pretty high by the end, and i'm fine with people farming it if they should so desire, but the cap prevents infinite cash, and likewise will you get besieged by red strafers (which give no points on kill) if you hang around too long in the end of a level with too few enemies left.

As for lives, I'd guess that if you start out with 5 lives and gain 1 extra life automatically every time you gain a skill point, and then replacing the main upgrade shop with an entirely new shop that sells lives (expensively) once the player has bought all the upgrades (and therefore has no more use for money), the game should be just balanced enough for an average player.  (Assuming that I am an average player. )

That sounds pretty reasonable, although a restructuring of the shop would be a pain in the arse. Lives alone shouldn't be TOO hard to implement, so hey, maybe in v1.1. :V

To keep players from bailing right before losing a life, you could make the game save when a level starts - with one life removed, to be "refunded" when they beat the level.  If they restart, the game assumes they lost.  That should prevent save-scumming (which, given the reasons above, would actually make the game less frustrating).  It's a short game, it doesn't really need a save function anyway.

Not a bad idea; having a supply of ships and then fielding one (i.e. playing) naturally takes one out of your supply, but it gets added right back when you return. Or hey, to make it funnier, maybe the bail button is a self destruct button as well. :V

[Shook]

Ok so, been patching a surprising amount of things in the past week, but before i roll out the patch (and full changelog), i need some feedback: I intend to rework the defensive upgrades so they're less lame, basically. I have a new list here:

1. Crash Armor (-50% crash damage)
2. Dash (same as Improved Dash from before)
3. Sensor Upgrade
4. Shield Upgrade
5. Shield Capacitors
6. Energy Absorbtion (mooks dying give super energy)
7. Reactor Overcharge (previous two upgrades can store up to 200% super energy; stat boost while overcharged?)
8. TOUGH

Basically, shifted the sensor upgrade down the list so it seemed less underwhelming for its level, condensed dash and crash armour into single upgrades, and shifted Shield Capacitors down to make room for two new and probably more powerful upgrades. For reactor overcharge, i'm thinking a percentage boost (flat or scaling?) to either several stats or just damage, and obviously it gets used by super shots and maybe decreases slowly towards 100%. How does that sound to you guys?

[Shook]

Well, since nobody's saying anything, i'm going to assume it's literally perfect. Been working on implementing the things:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Decided to make it a fairly hefty (multiplicative!) bonus due to how difficult it is to actually max it out and keep it maxed. Super shots still consume energy, and while they also enjoy the damage bonus, it also reduces it immediately afterwards. Excess energy also decreases over time, dropping slightly faster the more you have. Still, even if you only have it at around half an extra bar, that's still a 25% damage bonus on all your shots!

I'm gonna test it for a day or two, then y'all can have it as well. Here's the full change log for now:

Spoiler: Change log (click to show/hide)

- Miniboss (Leviathan and Despoiler) collisions no longer guarantee death; now inflicts 150 damage scaled by hull percentage that ignores defense by default. While this sounds like a lot, it's actually a significant reduction; previously, with ram damage equalling remaining hull points, a green Leviathan would deal up to 400 damage depending on how damaged it was, and a red one could clock in at a staggering 700 damage, if you had the final defensive upgrade. If not, they just set your health to 0. Now, you can actually survive being rammed without said upgrade (which still works the same; lets your defenses apply at half strength to massive attacks and full strength to small yellow/red beams), and perhaps more importantly, the lower difficulties have fewer guaranteed instakills to worry about. :v
-- Boss collisions still fatal!

- Fixed unreliable behaviour of beam supers. As a slight downside to this, these now require slightly greater precision; the collision detection is no wider than the beam itself, but since it's actually a series of partially overlapping circle checks, it's actually most often narrower, and is done the frame before the beam itself becomes visible, meaning that there might be some very close misses. I've tried to minimize this, however!
Additionally, beam supers had far more piercing power than they were supposed to once you had the 5th offensive skill. It made them only lose half as much power as they should when hitting an enemy. This has been fixed, but don't worry, they're still powerful. :v

- Defensive skill upgrades reworked, should be more interesting now!

- Green shields now deflect your shots (except rockets, because they gotta boom to do damage) even with the shield piercing upgrade, but fret not, this is actually beneficial! They still take damage, but the deflected shots can potentially hit other enemies as well.

- Successfully made the "tink" hit sounds less maddening in the late game (no more than one instance can be played per frame now)

- Fixed and tweaked the AoE damage of upgraded rockets, it should be more reliable now.

- Limited lives implemented (and an infinite lives cheat!).

- Leviathan warnings with sensor upgrade now more obvious. They also give a minor ping without said upgrade, which, unlike the previous ping, actually follows your view so you can see it.

- Hopefully fixed galaxy-related crash on stage start.

- Final phase of final boss now slightly less brutal on higher difficulties; rate of fire is capped at that of Normal difficulty and health is reduced a little bit.

- A few other tweaks here and there.

Sound good?

[Gentlefish]

You should call infinite lives "classic mode" maybe? Considering it was how this project was initially developed.

[IndigoFenix]

Sounds good!  I'll try it out when you post it.

[Egan_BW]

Dammit how did I miss this reaching 1.0 I love this game.

Probably Way Too Damn Late to be making suggestions now, but a decent alternative to limited lives would be letting the player replay earlier stages, trying to get more xp than the first time around. So you can't grind on earlier levels endlessly, but if you can do better than you did the first time, you can get more skill points to spend and help you get through the later stages.

[Shook]

Hee, well, i didn't exactly make a spectacle out of it, probably a lot of people who neither noticed or cared. :v
As for the suggestion, i did actually consider that during development, but as of now, it'd be a major restructuring to implement, and frankly i think it'd just break the flow of the game. It's not really long enough to warrant this kind of extensive stage selection, and it also raises the issue of whether you keep your upgrades or not, and how to save the stats from that stage, et cetera. Basically, suggestion appreciated, but not going to happen.

You should call infinite lives "classic mode" maybe? Considering it was how this project was initially developed.

Well, i did consider making it an option, but the issue there is that i've not been a smartboi with the design of the options menu; there's just no more room for more buttons without wrangling it a lot. That besides, it does constitute an unfair advantage over what is now vanilla gameplay, so i'm personally okay with having it be a cheat code. I suppose making it a thing in Config.ini is possible, but i don't know how many people realize that you can actually just open that with notepad and fiddle with things. :v

Sounds good!  I'll try it out when you post it.

Excellent, glad to hear!

[Parsely]

Trying this again since I last posted here, Shook could we get an autofire feature so I don't have to hold the buttons down? Or a fire toggle?

E: Also, I'd like it if the dash had more feedback, like making me faster, or making me poof, or having a sound effect, at first I didn't know the dash was working!

I should have gotten splinter sooner, it's really good.

E2: Oh and maybe having the special meter (and HP too?) change colors when it hits different tiers of charginess so I don't have to look directly at it to know what level its at?

E3 2019: This is still a really fun game that I'm not good at!