A while ago I posted about re-doing level-end scores, but that was only one aspect of scoring, and it was only half-done!

This week (among many, many other things) I finally got scoring completely in the game and finished off.

The first task was deciding how many points you get for killing each enemy. Enemies are generally classified as being small, medium, or large, giving 5, 10, and 25 points respectively. Bosses, on the other hand, are worth 500-1000 points — occasionally more. When you kill an enemy, the amount of points you get is multiplied depending on your current style rank — ranging from x1 when you’re at D, to x5 when you’re at S.

I can’t say I spent weeks agonizing over these numbers or anything, I just did what I thought would be fun. I feel like it’ll be way more satisfying if bosses are worth a ton of points, and the large multipliers at high style ranks will make a huge gap between the scores of skilled players and novices. Additionally, while you don’t get a bonus for playing on harder difficulties this time, there are more enemies in harder difficulties, so you do have more opportunities to earn points. I hope it won’t put new players off. I do hope they’ll find it rewarding as they see their scores go up by large amounts as they improve.

I also had to consider the areas of the game with respawning enemies, because I don’t want players to be able to stall there and rack up infinitely high scores. I figure it’s best if these enemies give diminishing returns that quickly drop to zero — so you still have a reason to engage with them, but it’s not open to exploits. I tried to make it so if you have reasonably good accuracy you’ll be able to get all the available points without stopping to farm them, even if you’re moving really fast. Again on harder difficulties, since enemies respawn more quickly, the number of enemies that give you points in these areas will be greater.

I also played through each level at a brisk-but-not-crazy-speed-run pace, to see how quickly they could be cleared. I took my best times and added 30-45sec, and used those as the target times for each level. If you match those you’ll earn an S on the final score screen, dropping a rank with every additional 20sec you take. It feels really generous to me — I think speed is the aspect I want to be the most lax on. I’ll have to playtest a bunch and see how hard it is for regular players (ie. people who haven’t been playing the game for the last 3 years) to hit.

I don’t know how many people play these kinds of games for the scoring — I know I don’t — but I do think scoring has some valuable reasons to exist At the very least, it’s a useful tracker of progress for people who are playing Arcade Mode, allowing them to place on the leaderboards and have something to aim for even if they can’t clear the whole game. It also lets them see how they’re improving, encourages interacting with the enemies instead of blowing past them, and might give the game a little more replay value trying to beat your own scores.

I hope this wasn’t too dry! I’ll be back next week with more feature implementation and bug fixing, whee!