Rogue Wave, an FPS Roguelite, was started as a community activity on our Discord. Originally planned for around 10 days, including the December holidays, we managed to put together a good little prototype. Officially the project finished on Dec 29th 2023. However, it has continued.

Myself and a few other community members have been plugging away at that prototype, turning it into a vertical slice. It’s still a long way from complete, but it is playable and enjoyable. So here’s the latest version. The code and all the art and sound assets (which are prototype quality) remains open source, with the exception of Neo FPS which is a paid asset on the Unity Asset Store. We’d love your feedback and, if you are a Game Dev, your contributions.

So what’s new in this version?

In-Game Powerups

We’ve changed the way in-game powerups work. Previously when you levelled up you were given a chest to open. In the chest there were three powerups. You picked one. The problem with the approach was it meant the flow of the game was broken and sometimes the powerups were inaccessible because they would spawn right in the middle of a massive combat. So, we fixed it, at least we think we did, let us know what you think.

What happens now is that when you power up your Nanobots will offer to call in a recipe transmission from the home world. You can hit a key to request that recipe and a short time later it will be available to you. However, if you don’t want that recipe you can wait for a cooldown (30 seconds at present) and a new recipe will be offered.

This means that you can wait for the “perfect” power up recipe, which may never come, or you can take the one that is “good enough” and available now.

Greater Victory Rewards

It was previously very satisfying to blow up the enemy spawners, but when you got into your next run you often felt your resource rewards were low. We tried giving you more time to run around grabbing resources before the end of the level, but that was just boring. The enemies were dead so you were simply running around.

In this release we have temporarily boosted the power of the magnet during the victory screen. This means that all resources within a certain radius will be automatically collected. This means you still have an incentive to end the level where there are plenty of enemies to drop resources in the final spawner battle, but you are not left to run around collecting them in an empty level.

Game Feel Improvements

There’s a ton of Game Feel improvements in this release. For example, weapon pickups are now instantaneous, so you no longer have to slow the game down to grab them. We’ve also added some new visual and audio feedback to some enemy deaths and player damage.

We’ve also done a bit more balancing on the enemies we have so far. The most critical change here is in the way lasers work. Previously laser equipped enemies took a little while to lock on, but once locked on they never missed. This felt unfair as there was no indication to the player that an enemy was locking on, it just felt like they were shooting and hitting without fail.

In this version you can now see the laser locking on, there is an orange “sensing” laser that can be seen searching for you. When it turns red it is locked-on and hurts. This has the added benefit of enabling you to quickly figure out where these enemies are as they are often in the sky.

There’s a bunch of new buildings in here too. These don’t just add visual interest but they also serve to inform the player where the mini-spawners are in the level as well as providing more nooks and crannies within which to hide. this is especially useful when being swarmed by flying enemies.

Talking of flying enemies, in the third level it was proving exceptionally hard to compete with the numbers of Laser equipped saucers. Rather than reduce the number of saucers we added an explosive death effect to them. This means that careful planning of which saucers to destroy can result in a chain reaction. It feels great taking out 5 saucers with a single shot.

One simple, but very impactful change, was to improve the lighting. The deepest shadows are no longer so deep that you can’t see an enemy in there.

AI Director

We’ve also improved the AI director to make the game ebb and flow a little more. What happens now is that the Director sends out Sensor enemies. These are unarmed enemies who can track the player, even without line o sight, to within a certain accuracy. Once they have seen the player they will update the director on their position.

The AI Director will then manage the flow of enemies to the player position based on the current game state. While the player must decide whether to spend time bringing down the Sensors in order to blind the AI Director for a short period, while the build new sensors.

Everything Else is Fun Too

As you would expect there are also numerous smaller improvements as well as refactoring of the code to enable more flexibility moving forwards.

We think the game is getting to be truly enjoyable, but of course it is still very early days. Please download it (it’s free) and let us know what you think. If you like it and are a Game Dev maybe you would want to help us, come see us on [Discord](http://bit.ly/WizardsCodeDiscord].