More Relentless Waves (Dec 19 2025)

Some bad news for the game mentioned last time (which I’ll call the dungeon game). The ideas for it haven’t been coming to me. One big issue with having obstacles spawn in random locations is that they can lead to either really easy levels (one half of the screen has nothing there and you zoom past the level) or really unfair ones (especially since you have 1 health). Which means already this game has hit a dead end and I’ll have to do something else.

Instead I went back and did a little more work on previous games. For Randomly Generated RPG I did a little rebalancing and fixed a few visual bugs. Since I’ve been updating these games, I decided I needed an in-game way to tell players what had changed in each update. This was something I had figured out a while ago, but for some reason didn’t bother adding in. On the title screen of each game, there is a dropdown that displays a date, and changing to that date displays a textbox, and in that textbox I can write what changes were made on that day. Originally I would type the update notes into scriptableobjects, but then I realized I needed it to be translatable, and I switched it to use enums (which I implemented last week). 

Most of the work went into new enemies for Relentless Waves. In the past I tried and gave up on an enemy that followed you around in the past, but this time I tried the idea again. One issue I had is that if there were two enemies that followed you around, it was possible for them to overlap each other in their movement, and then they were pretty much the same enemy. It had to do something other than shoot bullets at you. Then I took an idea I had from the dungeon game, which is that it can have orbs that orbit it. This idea combined pretty well with a moving enemy, since if the enemy never moved, the orbs would be very predictable and easy to avoid. And if they do overlap, their orbs will be in different positions for you to avoid. I ended up theming it as a planet with moons orbiting it.

The last enemy took a lot of work for me to figure out what it should be. The concept was, the enemy had a shield, but you can lower the shield, and while it’s raising back up, you go in and attack. The question then was how to lower the shield. My first attempt was, you had to step on some switch in a random location. That sounded cool, because staying in one spot for a period of time makes you vulnerable to other bullets. I also surrounded the switch with walls that hurt you if you touched them. But the random placement was a huge problem. If there were multiple of these things, they could end up very close to each other, and there’d be no way to touch them without hitting any of the walls. Then I realized I could drop the switch idea and have it where if you’re directly below the enemy, it’ll drop its shield down on you. That pretty much solved the problem, and I themed it as a mechanical crane lifting and dropping some concrete. But now it resembled the knight a lot, who shoots downwards. Since knight was already one of the easiest enemies, I changed it to also shoot a bullet at you as well.

I had also tried another enemy that followed you around. I tried an enemy where its position changes depending on where you are on the screen. If you’re around the middle of the screen, it will move just above you. If you’re slightly below the middle of the screen, it will go below you and you can’t hit it. What I discovered was that 1) the math to determine its position was hard to calculate, 2) since it hovers just above you it’s hard to avoid its bullets, and 3) if you didn’t know its mechanic it just felt like it moved randomly. I also tried an enemy that just rushed at you, like a melee enemy. And I tried it out as a boxing glove, but a day later I got rid of it as it didn’t impress me much. I want to get to 15 enemies, but haven’t come up with a replacement yet, and the game is only at 14 enemies. Probably there’s a way to fix the concept mentioned above, where you have to stand still in an area surrounded by walls.

Unless I get a sudden burst of inspiration for the dungeon game, I guess for now I’ll continue tweaking old games. I’ll definitely try to figure out a new enemy for Relentless Waves, but I think I’ll also try to find something to add to All Shapes and Sizes. With how simple the gameplay is, and the failure of saving shapes for later, I don’t really know what I can add. I don’t know if I will be able to figure out any new levels, game modes, or items to drop. Just looking at my github, I have barely added things to this game after releasing it in December 2023. But I guess it’s possible I get an idea.