Rear-Shot and Deflector-Shields Tweaked

in Rock Popper Deluxe Devlog Last modified at:

Tooled around this evening, making some indifferent changes:

  • Bugfix: Figured out that the reason some of the background features weren’t decaying when asked to was that decaying and spawning weren’t mutually exclusive, so they’d fade in and out at each step and ultimately retain their opacity. Oops.
  • I tried to fix the feel of rear-shot by having the rear bullet invert the (momentum-modified) vector of the forward shot, rather than just “shoot again, but backwards” from the ship. I’m not sure if it helped, but I eventually removed recoil from shots entirely when using the rear-cannon, and it does feel much better. I also bumped up damage on the rear shot to encourage risky butt-first play.
  • I modified the shot returned by repulsor shields to always (weakly) seek the original shooter. It has the effect of making reflected seek-shots less lethal, but making all reflected shots dangerous when fighting enemies. When enemy shots are deflected by the player, they just look weird and don’t really hit anything. Not sure how I feel about it.

I had an idea that rather than flat points values on the points module drops, I could increase the player’s point multiplier, making them much more interesting to grab.