For the horde mode to be viable for gameplay with player stats that don't escalate exponentially towards infinity, I need more stochastic and patterned area-denial weapons, so that's what I'm going to focus on when I fill out the weapons list.

Luckily, of the three main categories of weapons (light, heavy, and magic.. a holdover from the action RPG stat system that is now part of the skills), the one I have developed the least is magic, and it's got the most fertile thematic ground for that sort of nonsense.

A lot of the screen shots I take are the moment when an attack is critical because those are dramatic and cool, and is determined when it's generated rather than when it hits so I can apply effects like scaling up the weapon to hit more foes.

Like, the arrows in the first pic in this thread aren't normally like that. The axe, with a few levels in it, is like that. But it's slow to fire, moves in a fixed arc, and does not flip directions if you turn the other way while it's swinging (the sword and shield reverse with your sprite). Cleaving a wide path is its whole deal. It doesn't get bigger when it goes critical; instead, it moves faster and gains a whole 360 degrees to whatever its arc would be. (A fully upgraded axe is already 350 degrees, while the initial arc is 170)

*maze-drawing algorithm, I mean.

Anyway. That's the state of the game. The other thing the horde test helped me realize is that the current weapon list (6, which is just enough that you'll collect all of them in a run with the current limits) is heavily biased towards directional attacks.

The bow and arrows automatically aims at the nearest enemy, the whip lashes out at a randomly chosen enemy near you... I was going to try to weight it for the largest concentration of enemies near you, but that gets computationally expensive, and if it picks one enemy, it's already more likely to hit the area with the highest concentration), and the magic lantern (those orbs of fire that don't yet match the other weapon sprites in style) but fully half the existing weapons either fire in basically the direction you're moving in or (in the case of the axe, which always swings in an "overhead arc", the direction your sprite is currently facing)... nothing truly random, or area-effect beyond a large sprite.

I do like the way the randomly strewn text happened to create paths and tunnels so often, even without a cave-drawing algorithm. (See linked post.) One of the environment types I have in mind is going to be something like a maze of tunnels and caves with walls that will be filled in with pre-rendered text textures.

https://elk.zone/peoplemaking.games/@AlexandraErin/111150142174311728

For the horde tests, I removed their mechanical effects. Early on, when they are densest (the theme here is that your progress clearing sectors is removing corrupted files and it is reflected in the environment), they form shapes that look so much like cave walls that I wanted them to act as barriers, but they can't be absolute because I don't want monsters to have to pathfind in randomly generated environments, and the random placement could screw you.

So I made them slow you down while in them, and apply debuff stacks to your damage resistance the longer you're exposed to (and the more overlapping ones are in your space). And that was cool and interesting!

But trying to keep track of which parts of the floor are lava in horde mode was less interesting, so I turned it off. And will probably leave it off. There will be elements that do either or both of those things in the properly designed environments, but the concept doesn't need further testing until I can test it how it will actually work.

Like the copypasta text blocks that are used to give the level a sense of texture and space (because otherwise it's difficult to tell if you're moving or if things are moving around you, when you're always centered in the screen... oooh, I should let the camera slightly "drift" behind you, that would also help)... they are a rough approximation of one of my planned stage environments, and they generate in incidentally cool and evocative patterns that have helped inspire me. But the current actual object and the generation method are not permanent and not sustainable (I have to throttle the FPS to 30 or it lags when they're particularly dense), and inferior to more deliberate planning and placement, and so it's temporary.

But I keep getting drawn into ways to enhance the effect. An effect that I plan to get rid of.

One way that my game projects tend to fall apart is that I make placeholders that I know are placeholders and then start thinking "But couldn't this placeholder be better?" and not only waste time perfecting a sketchy outline that is meant to be replaced, but wind up cementing its existence in the body and blood of the project in ways that make it difficult to extricate and replace.

Trying to be conscious of that as I move forward with this one.

Last night when I took those screen shots it was near the end of my day and I was a bit tired and my meds were worn off, and I was kind of dispirited about how quickly and completely the math falls apart after the first boss fight.

This morning I remembered that I have actually been designing around that stretch of the game (the first fifteen sectors and then the boss fight in sector 16) and couldn't tailor the progression for past that because I haven't defined parameters for "past that"; with no content designed to enter the loop after sector 16, the game just repeats the same content with bigger numbers over and over again, which is... playable, but not interesting, and not the intended course of gameplay.