Bad Ideas

[Monkooky]

Ok so I had some terrible, ill conceived ideas for items.
Being a reasonable, rational person I immediately acted on these ideas. (A few are still in development.)
They all have stupid high drop rates to make testing easier.

The Plasma Charger:
A charge type weapon with three stages, all should have roughly equal DPS (does charge rate change with fire rate?):
No charge fires small mundane shots.
.5-1.5 seconds of charge fires a modestly sized shot that reflects off walls and passes through enemies. I'd like this to be able to multizap things, but can't find a way to.
>1.5 seconds fires a rather large shot that explodes.
This guy I feel is the most in need of feedback, I'm not super happy with how it turned out. I might tweak some more.
Also, does the charge system not work with main guns? I couldn't get it to work with main guns.

The Excessive Force™ Missile Launcher:
A sacrifice shop missile launcher. Heh heh heh.

The F-23 Faceripper:
The F-23 Faceripper is a rapid fire shotgun with a spool up mechanism.
This sounds more reasonable than an "Excessive Force Missile Launcher."
It isn't.
Not by a long shot.
(Lazy implementation atm. This one is a little on the silly side so it's not really worth polishing.)


Yet to come:
Unnamed Incredibility or Mech Passive:
+Lots of health
+Many max missiles
Your mech's max health goes down as you take damage. (Preventing you from ever healing for any reason)
Your mech's missile capacity goes down as you use missiles. (Preventing you from recovering missiles for any reason)

Reflector Shield:
Temporarily ?surrounds? you with walls that reflect enemy shots and knock enemies back.
Probably op as shit.

Unnamed Incredibility:
Heal when you hit, hurt when you miss.
I don't think this is possible without being hella janky, or particularly interesting. Unlikely to make.


I'm sure more will come to me.

[ptarth]

• You can setup a dev script, test chamber, or just add them to the mech definitions to do testing.
• Charge weapons are still awkward. They need some loving when it comes to audio & visual feedback, which means more is needed in the source for image manipulation. Its a work in progress.
• Not sure what multizap means.
• I would say that each stage should add a property and not change the shot completely, so 1 = basic, 2= bouncy, 3= bouncy + explodes.
• I could see the Main Gun system and the charging system having major interaction problems, so I'd guess that would be the case.
• I experimented with the +max health but never regen ever again methods. I was never happy with it. In thinking about it now after an absence, perhaps make it a mech passive and then give the mech level ups where players can add more max life as a perk. That would be different. Then again, lots of player (e.g., Misery, Windless Zephyr) spend all of their life on sacrifice items and then this means that they will die if they ever take damage. This really leads to rapid emotional binging (I'm uber, I'm dead, This is unfair, uninstall).  Also, it comes to mind a mech with extra lives, it respawns on death with or without a penalty for a limited or unlimited number of times.

[Monkooky]

You can setup a dev script, test chamber, or just add them to the mech definitions to do testing.

I stuck things on the mech for functionality testing, but picking it up midrun I feel gives a better idea of balance.
Also, it theoretically makes sure things like the Faceripper being a secret shop item don't occur. Whoooops.

Not sure what multizap means.

Multizapping was a thing in some roguelikes (and early D&D) where you target your spells so they hit enemies multiple times, due to bouncing off a wall and hitting on the rebound.

I would say that each stage should add a property and not change the shot completely, so 1 = basic, 2= bouncy, 3= bouncy + explodes.

Is there a reason for this?
Not that I wholeheartedly disagree, but my goal was to make each stage have a different use case and just adding properties somewhat detracts from that.

I could see the Main Gun system and the charging system having major interaction problems, so I'd guess that would be the case.

Sad.

I experimented with the +max health but never regen ever again methods.... snip

Lots of +health perks on a mech would be interesting. Makes it a tradeoff between preserving your health and rushing the boss and taking the risk of farming chump mobs.
I'm probably going to do this one next, even if it might turn out to be awful.

Thanks for the feedback!

[ptarth]

• As defined, I think multizap will function or that there is a tag for it.
• It is my belief that if weapons change their nature due to charging length, this will cause players to be annoyed. This would be due to the player needing to time, with some level of precision, the length of time to hold down/charge the weapon, in addition to dodging and aiming. Overcharging would be bad outcome for a situation. If instead of changing the nature of the shot, it just makes the shot better in various ways, the player would never be sad if they overcharged a shot. This reduces the frequency of outcomes that are bad. If your weapon does change the nature of the shot, then, to be a better design, the badness of overcharging to correct charging ratio needs to be more attractive than the system that does not have overcharging.

[Monkooky]

Took forever to respond cause I got too busy to work on this. 
I could not find a tag that would allow multizapping- the tag for contact damage/sec does not seem to work, and I could not find a tag that would explicitly allow a thing to hit twice. The Passes_through_enemies (or something akin to that) tag explicitly forbids hurting the same enemy twice, which may be the problem. I'll look some more when I have time again.

You have a good point about the charge.
A very good point.
I'll probably change this when I get time for the next iteration.