Post by cyberchocobo on Mar 27, 2024 0:18:40 GMT
For Microsoft Windows only.
This is my personal modding project aiming to fix both the objective and subjective flaws in Tyrian. Since the eventual scope of this practically-a-remake mod will be very large, I decided to tackle this one step at a time, the first being the tools available to the player.
The original game has an absolutely enormous armoury, with 45 main weapons and 31 sidekicks, plus a bunch ships with unique sets of twiddles and special weapons you can pick in the stages. However only a minority of those are practical to take, the rest being severely underpowered and/or mechanically broken, or just not available in standard gameplay. To solve this, I went over every shot pattern of every weapon and adjusted not only the shots' damage and rate of fire, but also their patterns. The weapons still use the same sprite graphics for their projectiles as they originally did, but their arrangements are frequently very different. Furthermore every shot pattern has its own power drain assigned to it - no more Lv1 Rear Mega Pulse being the most power hungry weapon in the game.
I went for a mathematical approach - calculate each weapon's approximate damage per second output, work out an universal DPS(cost) function and then methodically rework every single shot pattern to match it, frequently completely changing how the resulting pattern looks. Then test these weapon in-game, identify outliers that achieve less destruction % than they should (usually because of a suboptimal shot pattern or low rate of fire) and adjust them specifically.
Front Guns were already all tested this way at levels 5-11, plus a few I expected to suck at levels 1-4. But I cannot rule out need to adjust them further - I've only ever done any testing on episode 1 levels starting from Hard difficulty with vanilla dynamic difficulty for sake of uniformity.
Rear Guns I've only tested on level 11, and then implemented everything else lazily without any testing. Ammoless sidekicks weren't tested at all. Ammo sidekicks are not yet implemented. Only 4 defensive twiddles (Invincibility, Auto Repair, Repulsor, Ice Blast) are implemented and aren't really tested - the offensive twiddles will come in a future update.
I'd really appreciate any testing feedback from other players, given the huge scope of the available arsenal and the varied gameplay scenarios across episodes and difficulties.
Special weapons is something I elected to get rid of altogether for Full Game - guns, sidekicks and twiddles should give you more than enough variety of options, and all of them are obtainable through shopping while special weapons are not.
Also made a lazy temporary shop content overhaul so that (almost) every episode contains (almost) every item so that it's easy to get and try out all these shiny toys.
A few other (not-so-)minor adjustments were listed in the textfile in the download. Also included is a spreadsheet with various data and calculations.
If there's a demand, I can post the modified source code (the app is based on OpenTyrian2000) and the C scripts I used to actually edit the weapon and item data.
ToDo for later versions:
v0.1.x:
- implement ammo sidekicks
- implement 4 new offensive twiddles
- fine tune existing weapon balance based on personal and others' feedback
- rework shop contents to something that makes more sense
- rework Episode 2 (mandatory Asteroid City) and Episode 5 (all 7 levels played back-to-back) progression structure
- prevent any powerup spawning in 1 player full game mode
- disable the optional minigame levels (EP1 and EP4 end) and all other game modes other than Full Game
v0.2:
- change enemy HP logic to have one 16-bit HP value for an enemy instead of dividing it up between different segments
- rework every single enemy and enemy-like entity in the game, using their placement in vanilla levels as basis
- implement new engine logic (especially for bosses) as required
- rebalance all weapons to adjust them to new enemy logic
- fine tune difficulty modifiers for enemy durability, rate of fire and projectile speed
v0.3:
- create a Tyrian level editor, or at least find a way to edit and test them efficiently
- remake every vanilla level (gameplay-wise, the graphics are already top-notch)
possibly later:
- re-implement other game modes (Full Game minigames, 1/2-Player Arcade, Super Arcade, Super Tyrian)
- graphical assets: varied icons and sprites of different ships, weapons and shields/generators
A short video:
(if you want something more visceral, play demo 2 and watch lv11 HGB tearing everything apart)