Yes, I do prefer to avoid the repel/attract effects. They really are problematic enough with the gravity wells. I had to fix SO many rooms because of those bloody things. You cannot put anything but the smallest enemies around them, since otherwise they can make stuff undodgable. Among other issues.
Yep. When I was first trying to figure out how it might work, I unlocked MagneticDefense inside Dayton_Powerups.xml, and found it made the player pretty much invincible. After that, I decided that to scrap the mobile repel enemy I had been considering, and honestly, even using repel for anything.
Attraction, on the other hand, doesn't seem to face the exact same problems, at least when it comes to enemies - there's a reason that MagneticOffense is pretty good. But attraction has a side effect that I think can be taken advantage of - it's harder to hit anything else. I don't think it's quite as bad as a normal gravity well, since as an enemy, they're destroyable, and then things get somewhat back to normal. For the mobile shields, giving them high HP/shields and putting them near things like blaze cannons gives the player a choice to make: do I take the annoying one or the dangerous one out first? If it's balanced, it's a choice they have to make every single time they see one.
tl;dr: I don't want to screw the player. I want the player to make bad decisions, and thus, screw themselves. That's much more fun.
Knockback swarm might still work, I'm not sure. It seems that the player would just always target them, dodging everything else in the room.
- Player and Enemy shots can be repelled differently.
Yep. I thought I saw some edge cases mentioned in the forum somewhere, but they didn't seem applicable.
- An enemy that repels player shots is hard to kill.
Very much so. It seems impossible with most weapons at a distance, at least if it works like it does on players.
- Shields sometimes just increase enemy health, so make sure the effect does something different to make it worth the cost of having a shield.
My thought is that I don't want the enemies to be immediately killed, even by players with high damage. They are, after all, pulling the bullets to themselves. They need to be able to survive that. Shields may well not be the best way to do that; needs testing.
- For multi-spawning enemies look at the Mini-Swarm Leaders GameEntity/CMP_Enemy_Ships.xml
Thanks. I didn't even consider the Mini-Swarm Leaders as a jumping-off point.
- grep is really useful for finding bits of code.
Yep. I use it in my day-to-day life. I've also been using git to source control my local changes.
- A text editor that does xml format checking is really helpful.
Using Sublime. It doesn't do much for consistently formatting XML, but it does detect malformed tags. I can always format it later (starlet, tidy)
Maybe something like that doesn't need to be just a mod. I could see this one working as an actual addition to the enemy roster.
If you see anything interesting, feel free to grab it. You have a lot more experience with how the system works and can get something working and most especially tweaked and tested much more quickly than I can, who started modding the game this last weekend. I'm interested in seeing interesting stuff in the game, not about who did what or came up with what. More importantly, I bit off quite a lot with the new perks, and I really need to do one thing at a time, or I'll keep getting distracted by new shiny toys forever.
