Early Access 2 - Everything hurts

Perk system reworked

• At the end of every wave, a single player will be chosen to receive an offer.
• All players will be unable to move and the camera will zoom in on the chosen player.
• The player will receive a single offer pairing an boon and a curse. (Previous players perks are gone. Monster perks may still be offered as curse.)
• With their chosen input method, the player may hold up to accept the offer or down to refuse.
• Monster perk descriptions will now be shown on the left of the screen during the choice state.

An issue with the previous player perks was how Health and Regeneration would always be the best perks, now matter how I balanced them. The others might be fun but none would help you survive or clear monsters like these two did. I also wanted to get rid of the two reserved keys only used only for picking perks.

This is just a start with a couple of options for boons and curses. I will expand it with more fun rare boons and curses to choose from.

New feature: Everything hurts

• Reworked the damage formula so it scales directly on the force applied.

Mass plays a much bigger role on damage in this new formula. A good rule of thumb is that the more you displace something, the more damage it takes.

• Clamping now does some damage. (Clamping is when two object are overlapped and moved away from each other without gaining more speed.)
• All obstacles except the wall now have a small damage ratio.
• Objects can now have an armor value. X armor means that you will prevent the first X damage you take every second.
• Players have 20 armor.
• Hoppers have 2 armor. While jumping, their armor scales with speed, starting at about 12. Their armor doesn't replenish while jumping or stunned.
• Hoppers make hp: 80 to 75
• Shellers have 2 armor. Their armor doesn't replenish while stunned.
• Slimes have no armor since they already have a built in damage mitigation.

Ok, first of all, why? I liked the idea of something taking damage when thrown into an obstacle at high speed. But it would make the game incredibly frustrating to take bits of damage every time you bruise an obstacle, let alone when you smash in one at high speed. Armor seems like a good compromise for this so little instances of damage are ignore but big ones not as much. It works of a 1 recharge time so it's also possible it apply many small instances by dragging something with your weapon. It also makes the game easier to play and makes it so much easier to navigate around Shellers. The clamp damage will also make it possible to "crush" something between obstacles to deal damage to it.

Balance

• Multiplier to the number of spawned monsters with additional players: 1.5 to 1.1
• Before every wave, monsters will gain 0.1 level of every Perk for every player in the game.

Eventually, I'll want the game to end at some point because, as the game goes on, there are always more objects to manage and I don't want the maximum reachable wave to depend on the system's performance. Playing with more player pushed the game to a high amount of objects much faster which would have forced me to "end" the game earlier than I wanted. I reduced this number greatly and added perks per level to put difficulty elsewhere and because they are much easier to avoid with the new choice system.

• Player move force: 285 to 345
• Played drag per second: 11.3% to 40%
• Weapon drag per second: 2 to 12%

I pushed the drag up some more to make the game feel less slippery and increased move force to compensate again.

• Hopper minimum speed: 3 to 4
• Hoppers now have a charging up animation when aiming.

QoL change. It makes it possible to see how soon they are to jump at a glance.

• Slime base mass: 420 to 380
• Slime shoot force: 120 to 100
• IV will be half as impactful on slimes.
• Force applied to slime will be divided among splits instead of duplicated.

This last change will make splits fly less ridiculously fast.

• At the beginning each wave, trees will be pushed out a little toward the wall.
• When starting a score attack game, trees and rocks will be pushed out towards the wall.
• Tree minimum speed: 1 to 0.1

Extending the wall didn't give a lot of new area to play in because most of it was cluttered with obstacles. Pushing these obstacles out of the way gives a lot more space to play in the middle of the arena.

Other

• Updated the formula for the drag and updated the drag value of every object to keep the same effect.

The previous formula didn't behave as expected. Object with a high drag value would not stop as fast as expected. With this new formula, 100% drag per second means the object will absolutely stop within the second. Comparing the values from this patch onwards to those of previous patch notes will not be an accurate comparison.

• Removed the grass and pebbles.

I couldn't get them to look decent. I'll find something else to break the monotony of the background in the future.

• Fixed an issue where the slime projectiles would absorb each other. They now pass through each other instead.
• Updated the Slime projectile sprite to make it's state more obvious.
• Fixed an issue where the game would crash when spawning players too fast.
• Performance improvements.