June '25: Metaprogression, and lots of Upgrades

Two big updates this month. I'll go into a bit more detail about my decision-making; let me know if that's interesting to you.

Upgrade Recipe System

Some upgrades are special snowflakes, unlike any other, and warrant special handling. The minions I added back in March are a good example. But not all upgrades in a roguelike are like that. Sometimes you just have a trigger, a subject, and an effect. And since I want a lot of upgrades so that I have a lot of interesting choices, I also want a development tool that makes it easy to make those types of upgrades quickly. So I created a recipe system that looks something like this:

The upshot of this is that I added 11 new upgrades this month, bringing the total to 21! That's... ok, that's still pretty far from how many I need for an interesting roguelike; that's probably closer to 80.

Metaprogression

Metaprogression is essential to modern (i.e. non-Berlin) roguelikes. By meting out additional options gradually, we protect the player from getting overwhelmed early, and we reward them for playing (with the promise of more if they play one more fight).

SolarFlare has a few additional challenges here. Unlike in a deckbuilder, a player can see every unlocked option at the start of a run. So to avoid overwhelming them in their first game, we need to narrow things down a lot. But the game is pretty boring with only a few upgrades, so we need to unlock new upgrades quickly; every stage, instead of at the end of the run. So that's what I did.