Getting balance right

Hi everybody!

Finally getting slowly back into the project. Got a couple of small improvements here and there for last couple of days. But I wanted to handle the problem of balance in Ghost Caretaker. On Ludum Dare every other comment was saying that this game is too hard, which it was by design, but learning curve was too steep indeed.

So we tried to solve that by redesigning how waves work.

It used by waves where on each wave the number of graves would spawn equal to the wave number. First wave - one grave, second wave - two graves and so on. There was always the same percentage for different kinds of Graves as well which made it not only get hard really quick, but also sometimes unfairly hard and unpredictable. You can get two Lantern Graves (the ones spawning two very fast ghosts) on Wave 2 and get instantly destroyed! No fun in that kind of losing!

 We designed waves which would be more akin to something you can see in games of similar genre. Enemies spawn slowly during each wave and then stop until you defeat the wave. Then next wave comes with a bit stronger enemies and there is more of them. Then comes a boss wave where enemies come all at once trying to overwhelm you. And after the boss it again gets slower, but there are new types of enemies (Graves in our case).

It's great since it has a nice change of pace with levels getting harder and harder, reaching a peak at a boss level and then falling back before raising again (like on a crappy drawing attached).

That's it for now. Planning to keep these Devlogs when we're working on the game. Thanks everybody for reading!

Much love <3