Hi, mine diggers!

I'm making this update because I've always been bothered by the difficulty curve which makes you stuck at wave 34-39. So I started fixing the balance which was really hard to do. Just calculating DPS wouldn't cut it because there are energy dispensers and where you place the turrets was really important for your damage output. After I balanced the game I wanted to work more on that placement idea. So I've added a few features:

New Turret!

I actually wanted the 4th turret in the jam version but run out of time. This new turret costs 50 gold. It's generating shield around 4 tiles like the energy turret. I hear you saying "Umm... what is this shield?". To answer that question we should continue!

New Event!

From now on, every 5 wave something drops from the above. It can be obsidian (a new type of unbreakable block), normal rock, gold mine, or some enemies (which has %50 chance). It instantly kills any turret underneath. This is where the shield comes in. It can protect your turret from being destroyed but if a rock is coming down, it will cancel it so no new rocks will appear. Also if some enemies dropping, it protects against the insta-kill but enemies will still spawn. Lastly, after a tile is protected, the shield on that tile will be gone until you place another shield turret.

New Enemy!

So here's the new pain-in-the-ass enemy you'll encounter. It picks a target turret (Prefably energy dispensers) and flies to that target slowly. It reaches it explodes itself and kills the turret if it's unshielded. It has a laser aim in front of it so if you can calculate which turret it's going for, you can shield it before the damage. It will start spawning after wave 10. Every third wave there's %50 percent chance of it spawning. Also, every 10th wave increases the spawn count of this enemy by one. But it still costs the Spawn AI money so spawning this will reduce the enemy count (Though not by a lot).

Other things

So I drew out some graphs for the difficulty and found out that it's exponential. There are lots of factors that affect difficulty: Enemy number, enemy health buff, Enemy AI's wealth, Time between waves, player's gold, turret placements, turret upgraded DPS, turret default DPS, turret costs, map road placement, gold mines on the map and more. I wasn't expecting this much depth in difficulty but it's actually a good thing and it proves that the game achieves what I wanted to achieve which is emergent gameplay. After lots of iterations, I've balanced the difficulty better. So let's compete in the leaderboard!

New block: Obsidian! I've made this block because in the end, after you've mined all the rocks, the only factor left that you needed to consider for placement is the road. This block is un-breakable so no more walls of the turrets :D

Better leaderboard. Some bug fixes and now, the world-wide leaderboard shows the next person's score. You can also progress more waves due to a new balance of difficulty.

Now, some waves will consist of only one type of enemy which adds variety.

Added a pause button. Everyone has some jobs to do, right?

And lots of bug fixes!

So what do you think of this new update?