Your team is dead, can you find the way home in this procedurally generated world? Choose upgrades that allow you to combine automated weapons with precision tactics, go all-in with guns blazing or let the nanobots do the dirty work. Whatever you do, you can’t die, but you can still lose it all.

Here’s the last release of Rogue Wave, our alpha of an FPS Roguelike Wave Shooter. Testers loved the last release, which focused on a move to placeholder concept art from the grey-boxing we had before. This meant we got a ton of feedback that focused on gameplay, so that’s what this release focuses on.

The primary goal is to get the player deep into the action as fast as possible.

Game Play

• World Design - world is no longer flat, taking us a small step towards the concept art we’ve been working towards:
• Weapon Feedback - hit markers are more informative, showing critical hits and ignoring building hits.
• Difficulty - added a difficulty slider for those who don’t enjoy the grind of the “outer loop” (upgrade strategy).
• Difficulty - “inner loop” (fighting enemy waves) is much more difficult making the “outer loop” (upgrade strategy) more engaging.
• Strategy - player is informed of the enemies to expect in a level before entering, allowing for a careful selection of loadout.
• Strategy - In-progress build progress bars so you can time your run.

Upgrade System

• Weapons - a player with fewer than three permanent weapons will always be offered a new weapon in upgrades offers.
• Stackables - a higher chance of stackables that you already own being offered again.
• Destructor beam - damage upgrade (stackable)
• Destructor beam - add additional beams (stackable)
• Destructor beam - increase range (stackable)
• Destructor beam - reduce cooldown (stackable)
• Fireball - reduce cooldown (stackable)
• Pulse Wave - reduce cooldown (stackable)
• Fireball Turret - a static weapon that fires on enemies within a radius
• Self-Healing - heal a small amount of damage each second (stackable)
• Offers - offers may now include items that are too expensive, giving a glimpse into possible future strategies

Enemies

• Enemies now operate in teams and will coordinate their attacks to keep the pressure up on the player, you can run, but you cannot hide.
• Improved enemy navigation, for example they will now avoid wandering outside the level boundaries and will (mostly) avoid passing through buildings (though a known bug means it still happens occasionally)
• Spawn rate will adjust up/down based on players current performance

Player Experience

• Introductory level - allowed us to reduce the number of tutorial levels. Right from the first load the player is thrown deep into the action. Stats were showing most players didn’t get to level 4 which is where the game started to get interesting. We now expose the player to action of level 4 intensity right at the start. The player will certainly die in this first level, but this is a Roguelike so dying is fun!
• “Trees” and “Bushes” - more visual interest and more easy sources of resources

Engine and Tooling

• Performance - a performance pass over the code gave us a very significant boost from around 60FPS at peak action to over 120FPS.
• Procedural Levels - enemy spawning got significant improvements allowing for more control in the level generation.
• Procedural Levels - added weighted random selection to the Wave Function Collapse algorithm when more than one tile is available. See my you tube video on Weighted RNG
• Hub Screen - lists of upgrades are now scrollable
• Hub Screen - if an upgrade is too expensive indicate it in the UI with a red “buy” button