Mmm, yes... The Horde
shall prevail......
Seriously, it will. The game doesn't have an upper limit on its generation. It starts off slow ... 3 enemies on-screen at once, then when you score three kills, it increments to 4 at once ... up to ten. From there, it gets tricky. You start with a base of 10, then add one-tenth the current max enemy: once that number is killed, it increments again (from 10 to 20, the increment is 2; from 20 to 50, it's 5; and after that, it's one-tenth of the current amount) ... long story short, they flood the screen if ever given a moment's chance (which frequently happens on a dodge). I'm usually too focused to keep specific track of it, but it seems to be around the 3rd one-up for me, sometimes longer ... depends on if I blink or not, LOL. I've found that snaking from side-to-side right before that first one-up helps keep them mowed back for awhile. I also tend to push the ship forward to its maximum vertical limit & hold it there; I can duck back from a shot once or twice that way and still get a second or two to recover enough space to move forward. ... Once they start clustering up behind your chosen line of action though, you're pretty much done for (I've managed a couple recoveries, but not much to speak of).
When I began the game, the only "objective" it had was to shoot as many as you could. That's still the main thing, I think (it was never meant to have any sort of depth at all) ... pretty much one of the old quarter-eating arcade games from the 80's (yeah, I know, most of those you could win at some point or another; this one, you really can't in the end). All that aside, one of the bizarre things that's emerged for me and a couple other testers has been a sort of "how long can you fend them off?" objective. It's like you're the last warrior standing on a battlefield that you've sworn not to run away from, and you
know you're about to die. *Chuckles.* Or something.
Weapon speed-ups have a chance to appear once there's 8 or more enemies on screen at once (the soonest that can happen is after 25 kills), and the energy bomb weapon has a chance to appear after there's 10 or more enemies on screen (soonest is after 42 kills). The shields power-up, hurm ... it's not tied to the enemy, just your shields (if they're at max, no new ones will be generated, as they degrade, the power-up will generate more frequently), but hmm'ing again; I think the chance to generate is set too low, actually ... at least once the enemies really start cranking out.
Safe zone .... when the ship goes transparent & you can't fire (while reviving), you can't be hit, either ... that works for earlier parts of the game, but with the horde, no ... every now & then you can make it to a small pocket, but it usually just gives them a chance to swarm past your line of action. I'm really not sure how to handle that and still keep the horde flood. Two rough ideas that come to me at the moment are to simply restart the player at the beginning, or to make the collision with the player ship set off a nasty explosion that wipes out a good chunk of the screen (that latter could be kind of fun to watch, actually.....).
Edit: Almost forgot, I was going to mention how that new weapon works. When it strikes an enemy, it uses their midpoint to create a 32-pixel square; everything in that area is dealt 3 points of damage (instant death for this type of enemy). Then it widens to a 64-pixel square & inflicts 2 hits on anything there. And finally, the square widens to 96 pixels and deals a single point to any enemies in that area. It's good for clearing out closely-packed clusters, although at the same time, it adds up toward your difficulty increase.
But anywho ... 31,575, eh? Not too shabby...
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