I’d really want there to be a completely randomized maze wave (affectionally called the Chicken Maze), where you start at a corner then you need to work your way to the end.
- In my mind this looks like a chessboard, but the area is stretched (so instead of 8x8 it could be 16x9 or something like that) to fill the screen, with all the edges being unbreakable barriers (except from ones close to the screen’s edge).
- The start of the maze is represented by a safe zone, and the end is represented by a barrier bomb. There are some chickens trapped in invulnerable boxes that can only be damaged once the barrier bomb is broken.
- Once the barrier bomb is broken, all the barriers are removed, and the chickens trapped in the maze begins to fly in random directions. (This is what I like to call chaos unleashed)
Because I hate solving the maze the same way over and over again:
- Some barriers will be removed at random, creating different paths to reach the end in each instance of this wave.
- Note that instances of this wave are seed-specific, so they are different if the overall mission name is different.
- Enemies trapped in invulnerable boxes may scale as the difficulty rises, so good luck solving a maze with invulnerable Chickenauts firing at you as you do it.
- Small note: I might ban Gatling Chickens purely because a wave full of that in invulnerable boxes might be impossible to do without Special Weapons - which would not be hard, it would just be unfair. (Then again, Wheel of Fortune does sometime give you full Gatling Chickens, so …)
- Some barriers can also be replaced with the lazers you see in Hairpin Turn, or are made breakable.
- The lazers replacement is only seen in higher difficulties.
- You’ll also find Anomaly zones in the maze to help you with breakable barriers.
- There can also be chickens placed alongside the main paths.
So yeah, that is Chicken Maze, and a look into how I think waves should be approached.
The name shows you the concept of the wave, and how it’s executed is different each time.
Random enemies / mirroring the map only does so much to make the wave feel distinct each time you play it. But anyways, that’ll be the end of my ideas for quite a while. Let me know what you think!
Some extra notes because I know some would ask this:
- CI2 Mother Hen Ship already has different executions depending on the wave’s difficulty.
- With Chicken Maze, I’m just cranking this up to 11.
- The randomness are seed-specific for obvious reasons.
- If they are completely random, you’d see a different variant each time you fly the same mission, which is not great for dares.
- I have a little style with my ideas. They are not easy to execute, but boy will they make a splash if they got added. Wish I could do more of these, but I’ll have to retire once again soon. This will probably be my last post for a while - though I’ll still respond to comments when I still can.