While thinking about my game at work yesterday I realized two problems with it's overall design that I want to fix:

• It lacks a way to feel like you've won which is very important in a video game.

• The score you can reach is fundamentally limited by the amount of free time you have to put into the game.

I believe this "stages" idea could fix both of these problems at once!

I'm going to keep the same difficulty curve (the XLogX/10 curve I'm currently using) and procedural enemy wave generation algorithm that there is but, every however-many points the player earns, Hensen will fly forward out of the camera view and a "stage complete" scene will be loaded, during which, the difficulty and score the player has reached will be saved to the player prefs.

I'm going to do this by having there be a "saved difficulty" value in the player prefs that will default to 0 and using the sum of this and the difficulty value outputted by the XLogX/10 difficulty curve as the difficulty read and used by the wave generation algorithm. The difficulty will still gradually increase as you complete more and more stages with minimal changes to my existing algorithm being required. The biggest change will be saving this difficulty on stage complete and making sure I pass the sum of the saved difficulty and the XLogX/10 function into the wave generation algorithm instead of just that output.

As for the score, that I should be able to save and calculate similarly.

When the "Stage complete" scene is loaded, the difficulty and score are both saved so whether the player chooses to exit or not, next time the main scene is loaded, those values will be used. I'll only reset them when the player either starts a new game altogether or when they are defeated. This will preserve the "score as high as you can" mentality of shmup games while also giving the game a challenge and reward cycle and more accessibility for players with busy lives and limited time to play.