This week I've continued chugging along with the gameplay rebalance and have had a couple more people play my game! Exciting stuff.  This week I reached out to a couple of Youtubers and had this video made covering Bloodmoon Survivors. It's very cool to see people playing and honestly this has been a huge help by pointing out the sore spots.

 Art

From an art perspective, LEVEL 3 is functionally 99% complete.  Ref and I are working on the last boss as we speak just trying to wrap things up.  We are so close to being done with it that I can almost smell it. I can't wait to show this level off because so far it's the best one we've put together!

The final boss of a burning and plagued level, this magnificent plague doctor will cleanse everything with fire and plague.

This character is looking cool and I can't wait to show all of his crazy abilities.  I think it will make a great final boss for a level that already is looking fantastic.

Music

Another bit of news is that Juan has wrapped up the final track! Exciting stuff! All that's left is to master it and then we're good to go.  Bloodmoon Survivors now has all the music it will ever need, which is kind of hard to believe, I can't wait to listen to the whole Ost hehe.

Programming

Unlike art and music this rebalance has been a real pain.  I am truly torn on how to do this and am realizing that the framework for blood moon survivors it really being stretched to the limit.  While more people have been playing it, I keep noticing a repeat trend that no one wants to play another round.  Watching streamers and youtubers play it has been making me find some common patterns, most noticeably the need for loot and difficulty.  As such I've been taking great pains to restructure the game.  Unfortunately this has meant breaking it down to it's very bones in order to set them straight.  I've revamped the knockback, fixed enemies weights so they don't push each other around, and spent this entire week refining the enemy manager.  All this was necessary so that I could build out better balanced levels.  The problems I keep seeing are people want SHORTER levels early, and they don't want to be so challenged.  So I've been hard at work slowing down the enemy progression at the start of game, and then ramping it up better at higher difficulties.

This is particularly difficult for me because I think I play my own game at a higher difficulty, and so do my playtesters, but the more I watch new comes the more I see how hard it is for them.  The goal is to make it easier early, and much harder later

The other thing I've been working on is balancing the upgrades. I really want the player to NEED them, which is something I haven't seen many people try to go for.  I want to create a dependency loop where the more people go for higher levels of play, the more they try to arm themselves with the powerups.  The goal is that by the higher difficulties players literally cannot win without an upgraded character.  That's not an easy thing to do haha.

Next Week

The goal is to keep working on balancing the levels.  I think once the levels are in a good place, it will be much more simple to onboard new players.  After that I think I'll be able to excite them about getting new weapons and powers simply by making them just out of reach until they grind the higher levels.  To accomplish that they'll need to buy upgrades.  I'm hoping that this loop works out, and I hope to get more players trying out the new changes next week.