Twin Strike

Every combat number in the game, in one place: the player ship and its four weapon types, pickups and the smart bomb, the four energy-weapon charge tiers, all nine regular enemy tiers, the Boss and Big Boss escalation curves, and the run-length pacing model that ties it all together. Generated straight from the project's own source (scripts/) and BALANCE.md — every figure below should match what actually ships.

Source: scripts/player.gd

A single interceptor with two independent emitters (left/right half), both always firing the same equipped weapon simultaneously. During every boss fight the ship splits into two independently-steered halves; outside boss fights it flies as one body.

Source: scripts/player.gd, scripts/weapon_base.gd, scenes/weapons/*.tscn

• Both emitters always fire the same weapon at once — total ship DPS is 2x a single emitter's DPS.
• Blaster, Laser and Spread share one global damage level (from DAMAGE_UP pickups): DAMAGE_LEVEL_BONUS_PERCENT = 0.15 per level. Torpedoes (0.20/level) and the four energy-weapon tiers (0.10/level) each scale at their own, different rate.
• Level 1 = base weapon, no pickups; Level 10 = 9 DAMAGE_UP pickups collected.
• Torpedoes are manually triggered — 2 tubes, independent 20s cooldowns each, so max sustained rate is one launch per 10s if fired the instant each tube is ready. Each fired torpedo also homes for up to 20s before despawning if it never connects (up from 8s) — the same max life as the two homing-missile types below.
• Rapid Fire doubles fire rate (not tied to weapon level) for Blaster/Laser/Spread only — torpedoes are cooldown-gated and unaffected.

Base stats (per emitter, level 1)

Ship DPS by level (both emitters, normal fire vs. Rapid Fire)

Torpedoes (own 0.20/level scaling, max 1 launch/10s)

Source: scripts/weapon_pickup.gd, scripts/main_game.gd, scripts/player.gd

Enemies drop one pickup on death, its type chosen uniformly at random from 4 kinds. The player collects it by flying within 1.2 units (either half-disc while split).

Mutating a pickup into the smart bomb

Shooting an uncollected pickup doesn't destroy it — every 3 hits it cycles to the next type (H → S → R → W → H…). After 12 such 3-hit cycles (36 total bullet hits), instead of mutating again the pickup turns into the smart bomb.

Source: scripts/weapon_pickup.gd, scripts/smart_bomb_shockwave.gd

Once triggered, the pickup flashes white/red, flies to screen center at the player's height, and detonates after a 0.5s fuse. On detonation:

• Screen clear — every enemy projectile on screen is destroyed instantly.
• Fire suppression — any Boss/Big Boss on screen has its fire suppressed for 2.0s.
• Missile burst — 12 homing missiles fire radially (30° apart), each dealing 200.0 base damage scaled by the player's current damage level at 10%/level (same rate as Energy Weapons below) — 200/missile at level 1, up to 380/missile at level 10. Speed 13.75, turn rate 4.0, 20s lifetime; each missile despawns on its first hit.
• Shockwave ring — purely cosmetic, no damage of its own.

Source: scripts/player.gd, scripts/yonshakudama.gd

Holding suppress-fire builds a charge meter at 10%/sec (0→100% in 10s). Releasing fires whichever of 4 tier thresholds the charge had reached — highest tier wins, not cumulative — and always starts a fixed decay back to 0 over 30s, during which the meter can't rebuild. All four tiers scale with the player's damage level at their own 10%/level rate (distinct from the 15%/20% rates above).

Source: scripts/enemy.gd, scripts/main_game.gd (_ENEMY_TIERS, _roll_squad_tier(), _LEVEL_TIER_WEIGHTS)

Nine regular-enemy tiers, unlocked progressively across the 12-wave campaign (see docs/enemy-tier-level-distribution.md for the full per-level unlock schedule). The type is rolled once per squad, not per enemy.

Base stats (wave 1, health_multiplier = 1.0)

* fires destructible bullets — see below; its listed DPS is a nominal ceiling only reached if none of its shots are intercepted. "Coll. r." is the hitbox radius used for all player-bullet/ram checks; "Visual ht." is the rendered hull's own world-space AABB height. The two are tuned independently — several tiers deliberately carry a hitbox smaller than their hull (grazing forgiveness). "Difficulty" is a qualitative 1–10 rating (HP, Avg DPS, speed, move/shoot-pattern predictability, discounted for destructible tiers) that Score is derived from: tiers are ranked by difficulty (ties broken by the prior score order) and Score = 50 × rank. See BALANCE.md's "Difficulty rating & score derivation" for the full derivation and the rule for re-deriving Score if a difficulty rating ever changes.

Kamikaze tier (Enemy 05)

Enemy 05 (2026-09-10, experimental, still being playtested/tuned) is the only tier with no ranged attack at all — shoot_min/ shoot_max are both 0.0, so it never fires a shot of any pattern. Its threat is pure movement instead: MovePattern.KAMIKAZE homes on the player's live position (both axes, not a fixed lane) until it reaches mid-screen, then locks its lane and dives straight down, surging to double its speed, so a player who moves clear of that lane escapes it (a dodged kamikaze costs nothing). Its speed climbs every frame, uncapped. Current tuning: speed 1.0–1.2 at spawn, accelerating at 1.8/s² — treat these as first-pass numbers likely to move again. Its only damage source is the same ram/collision mechanic every regular enemy already has — it just becomes the tier's entire threat instead of a secondary one layered under gunfire.

Destructible bullets (Enemy 01, 08)

Enemy fire is normally un-interceptable — strafing, not shooting, is the counter to it. Two tiers are the exception: their shot can be shot out of the air, and the interception pierces through (clearing every destructible bullet it overlaps, still landing on the shooter behind it, at no cost to the player's shot). Enemy 05 used to be the third destructible tier here but fires nothing at all as of 2026-09-10 — see Kamikaze tier above.

Per-shot damage and volley size are not wave-scaled for any tier — only HP and move speed grow with wave, so later waves are harder purely because enemies soak more hits and close distance faster, not because their guns get stronger (Enemy 05 is the exception — it has no guns at all; its danger instead grows with its own acceleration over the course of its approach, independent of wave).

HP by wave — health_multiplier(wave) = 1 + (wave − 1) × 0.16

Average DPS across all 9 tiers, unaffected by wave, ≈ 13.5. Move speed scales separately: speed_multiplier(wave) = 1 + (wave − 1) × 0.12 — 1.0x at wave 1 up to 2.32x at wave 12.

Source: scripts/boss.gd

Spawns at the end of every wave that isn't a Big Boss wave (1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10). Attacks escalate through 3 phases keyed off remaining HP (phase 2 at ≤50%, phase 3 at ≤25%). A separate player-tracking burst attack runs independently from phase 1.

* Theoretical max, every bullet connecting; phase 2/3 uses the Aimed/Cross average since they alternate each shot.

HP by wave — wave_health(w) = 1800 + 1400 × w

Source: scripts/big_boss.gd

Spawns instead of the regular Boss on waves 3, 6, 9, 11 and 12. Waves 3/6/9/11 are Boss 03B/06B/09B/11B; wave 12 is Boss 12F (Final Boss) — same 3-phase shape as Boss but larger volleys, an extra phase-3 Spiral pattern, and (Final only) one extra burst shot.

Final Boss fires 5 burst shots instead of 4 (5×14=70), same intervals — main fire is otherwise identical.

HP — wave_health(index, is_final) = is_final ? 96,000 : 9,600 + 3,200 × index

Source: scripts/boss_roster.gd — one hand-tuned entry per wave

Every wave's boss fight uses its own hand-tuned hitbox, independent of the shared Boss/BigBoss attack patterns above.

"Coll. radius (y)" only applies to Big Boss/Final entries (an elliptical hitbox — Boss entries are circular, x-radius only). "Ram radius" is the player-facing push-out/ram-collision boundary, tuned independently per axis (imported from ShipGallery's collision panel — see docs/import/all_ships.json); waves 9 and 11 give no explicit y value, so their ram boundary stays circular at the x radius shown. Every entry's ram radius is now bigger than that same boss's own hull collision radius, on both axes — the push-out boundary sits visibly outside the rendered silhouette rather than hugging it, acting as a force field around the boss. As of 2026-09-11 that field is no longer an invisible boundary in actual gameplay: a faint pulsing aura now renders at its edge, flaring brighter right where the player's ship makes contact. Touching it knocks the ship (or split half) away over a 0.5s window and costs 10% of max health (down from 25%) — see the Downstream TODO's "Boss Ram Radius as a Visible Force Field" entry below for what's still open (bullet-vs-field feedback, health-gated deactivation).

A rough at-a-glance comparison: player Ship DPS (using Laser's numbers as the conservative floor — Blaster and Spread both run higher, see the Weapons table above) against that wave's Boss/Big Boss HP, assuming weapon level tracks the wave number. TTK ignores dodging, downtime, and any Rapid Fire/energy-weapon/smart-bomb burst layered on top.

The wave curves above are tuned against a target of 20-25 minutes per full run.

Calibration: the old 10-wave run modelled at 1,374s and played in about 20 real minutes (≈0.87x the model), so the 12-wave run above projects to ~21.5 real minutes. Treat the model as a design tool, not a measurement — a timed playtest is the real gate.

Source: scripts/difficulty_settings.gd, scripts/boss.gd, scripts/player.gd, scripts/main_game.gd

Persisted player choice, selectable from a DIFFICULTY row in Settings and shown live in the HUD ("MODE: PRO"/"MODE: NOOB"). Pro is today's balance — every number elsewhere on this page. Noob applies a single flat multiplier (0.75x) across the board:

Noob runs skip the online toplist submission offer entirely — only Normal/Pro runs are meaningful to compare on the shared leaderboard. The choice is stamped into GameRun.difficulty and recorded on every replay.

What's actually queued up next, and what's blocking it — mirrors TODO.md, not exhaustive.

Blocked on the visual theme & art direction decision

Every current sprite is a throwaway 2D placeholder; a 3D artist is now available to build real geometry, and the candidate directions live in the art-direction dossier. Until a direction is picked, these wait:

Not blocked — ready to scope now

• Player ship VFX follow-ups — done (2026-09-10), since revised: the per-disc engine exhaust particle stream shipped in 0.3.7 but is disabled as of 2026-09-11 in favor of a retro CRT-style motion-blur trail (faded "ghost" afterimages of each hull half, driven by that half's own speed) tried in its place. Detonations (Yonshakudama, smart bomb) and, as of 2026-09-11, non-final boss deaths all trigger camera screen shake, deliberately not routine hits. A separate, still-open idea: a smaller shake specifically on hits.
• Weapon & pickup progression — letting the player choose which slot's aim a rotate affects, if independent per-slot loadouts are ever wanted. (Per-weapon-type damage upgrades were considered and discarded as unnecessary complexity — the single global DAMAGE_UP level is simpler to balance.)
• Scoring & fairness/QoL — combo/streak scoring done (2026-09-12): kill streak scales score up to 2x (+10% every 5 kills), resets on any unshielded hit with no decay timer, and pops a HUD banner at each milestone. Pause overlay resume/quit hints and a Pro/Noob difficulty select are both done (2026-09-17) — see the Changelog. Still open: no post-hit invincibility frames (considered and shelved 2026-09-17 — no concrete playtesting case for it yet).
• Enemy-type variety across waves — done (2026-09-10): per-wave tier variety was already in via _roll_squad_tier()'s per-level weight table across all 9 tiers (see docs/enemy-tier-level-distribution.md), and the remaining gap — no tier sought or charged the player — is closed too: Enemy 05 now uses MovePattern.KAMIKAZE, homing on the player and accelerating from a slow start until it hits or is destroyed, firing no bullets at all. Still experimental/being playtested — see BALANCE.md's "Kamikaze tier (Enemy 05)".
• gdlintrc baseline — kept at exactly one accepted error (audio_manager.gd:30); re-run gdlint scripts/ tests/ before committing so it doesn't drift again.

Bigger, further out

Discord Rich Presence, console platform-holder applications (Xbox/PS5/Switch), anti-cheat/score-tampering protection, and the full game-balance pass — the last of these is explicitly deferred until enemy variety, boss attack sets, and weapon progression above have landed, so there's a stable full run to tune against.