Dont mind the pic, I've drawn too many horny sketches that I can't find the right context for in-game so into devlogs they go
It's time to work on Decobot's scoring system. The game is definitely more on the bmup side at this point than the shmup side, and with that come states aka lengthy periods of the game during which you can't avoid shit and more importantly a lot of enemy behavior RNG.
I have 2 choices :
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Tie scoring to regular gameplay via things like enemy speed kills & group kills
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Create an abstract meta system that will minimize the importance of RNG in determining the player's score
The cons of the former are that once optimization kicks in the game will quickly devolve into gambling, and the more exciting I want to make this system (via exponential elements and massive bonuses) the more gambly it'll be. To average it out I'll have to keep it linear, but that's not as fun as seeing big puntos.
The cons of the latter is that it's unintuitive - the scoring no longer naturally follows from the rules of the game and exists as an abstract arbitrary meta-layer.
After giving it a lot of thought, what I'm going with is #2. A simple colored gem chaining system - different enemies drop different items/gems (determined by a large number of factors), you chain gems by collecting them and different color combinations have different score bonuses. So the system is mostly decoupled from everything going on in the normal combat, the only important point is the enemy's death and enemy behaviors around those moments of death. I'm going with this not just because I don't like it when scoring boils down to rerolling RNG, but also because I think this might offer a nice contrast to the more speed and quick killing oriented regular combat. A Cerebral Gameplay Layer as gamespot's Greg might have called it.
The final reason why I think it's a good idea to use this system is that I'm gonna release a demo soonish and it seems like a good opportunity for a test run. If it won't work then I'll go for the safer quick/group killing based system, cause it's a hell of a lot easier to implement than the gems and has been proven to mostly work ok.
Now the question is how long the gems should stay on the floor before disappearing, and how manual the pickup should be - auto pickup can be a pain in the ass when combined with enemy RNG, but if the timers are lenient enough perhaps this will averave out over time.
Also I might have to use fruits instead of gems in Treasure's honor o7