A Little Change goes a Long Way

That is my mindset (or rather what I want my mindset to be) when I'm trying to tweak games. Instead of getting carried away and adding a million new huge things, I start with the small stuff that still has an impact. For example: the game was unfair. Before adding a whole upgrade system with a bunch of unique upgrades (which I ended up doing but not first),  I just changed the cooldown for the waves as well as the quantity of enemies, which when tuned correctly, made the game an incredible amount much more balanced.

Games are "good" when they get the small things right - platformers, for one, have more complex physics and controls than you could ever imagine, despite everything seeming really simple. Coyote time, jump cooldowns, friction, fall gravity - all tiny little values that need to be incredibly finely tuned to make a game feel clean. A small, polished game will easily outshine an absolutely astonishingly massive game that feels clunky to play.

With that in mind, I started with the bugs, and there were plenty of bugs. From screenshake having a 50% to not work unless you are moving in which case it has a 25% chance, to the audio config menu doing absolutely nothing, to sound effect cues simply being off by a frame or two; these are the artifacts of a jam game which must be cleaned up before you can add anything successfully.

After that (and the aforementioned balance changes), I got to work on the upgrade system. The game felt a little generic and boring. I took inspiration from survivorslikes with the XP system integrating with your progress towards an upgrade (and the game as a whole).  Then I added a few basic upgrades to get the system functional, and bam. I now have a fluid framework which I can expand in the future. The point of this update was to make everything complete and working entirely smoothly. Every system is now a (nearly) perfect cog in a well oiled-machine. Even if there isn't much now, updates like these lay the groundwork for huge content expansions in the future.