I’m getting over being sick right now, so hopefully this post is coherent. I took a break from audio this week and tackled balancing the levels for the various difficulty settings!

In case that doesn’t mean anything to you: there are lots of changes to the game depending on the difficulty level, some bigger than others. Enemies spawn in trickier locations and get new behaviours, set-pieces might be longer or more complex, etc etc etc. Easier difficulties establish fundamentals that get expanded on as the game gets harder.

The whole purple/yellow reflectability thing is taken into account, too. On Easy, there are absolutely no yellow enemies (though bosses occasionally use some yellow attacks.) On other difficulties, yellow enemies appear more commonly as the game progresses. On Very Hard, there is a near-even mix of purple and yellow through the entire game (but not exactly 50/50, I think it’s more fun to favour the player a little.)

So, for some Easy vs Very Hard examples!

More baddies, more bullets, more yellow! The bullets move a bit slower on Easy, too.

Enemies take on new colours, and in this case get new abilities — Lil’ Guppies only fire on Hard mode and above. I try to follow some rough rules in terms of which enemies switch to yellow — enemies that fire the large shots generally remain purple, for example. It’s just too much fun being able to swat them out of the air (but, the occasional one does turn yellow.)

So on and so forth! I also made some changes to the levels as I balanced them — here, the yellow bullets didn’t show up well against the sky, so I added some background buildings to make sure you could see them. Conveniently, it provided space for the additional purple Invader to stand.

I also take co-op into account when I do this — in co-op it’s always an even mix of colours, and even enemies that shoot large bullets switch so that both players can have fun. Considering that enemies get added and subtracted on various difficulties, making sure co-op still features an even mix regardless of difficulty gets a little hairy, but I think I’m pulling it off.

I got about 80% of the game balanced in this way this week! I think it’s pretty good but a bit rough — I’m counting on playtesting in the future to show me where I’ve gone wrong. Next week I’ll finish off this task and move on to other things — probably back to audio!