Category:Upgrades

Spaz will be able to upgrade his chassis in a variety of ways that will unlock new abilities for him to use. We wanted to make these upgrades game-changing and not the simple linear upgrades you see in many games where you just do x% more damage or have y% more of this resource. When the player unlocks them it should have a major impact on the game. We even went so far as to combined previous iterations of our upgrades together into even more impressive upgrades. Every time a player receives a new upgrade we want to give them some good space to experiment with their new toy before they move on. The following are the major upgrades, we also have two linear upgrades which give the player more durability and water carrying capacity.

Steam Dash
"Spaz dashes forward with a burst of steam, allowing him to break through obstacles and cross large gaps in the blink of an eye."

As the first upgrade in the game we wanted the player to have a strong additional movement action while also gaining some utility. Steam dash gives him this major movement increase while also making sure they are responsible with it's new found power. It launches the player in the direction they are facing at a high speed, while consuming some steam pressure, so they must carefully judge their distance and resource management. They also gain the ability to break som obstacles by dashing through them, this may reveal hidden powerups or paths.

Steam Jets
''"Spaz focuses his steam thrust into jets of steam, allowing him to thrust upwards and hover for a short duration. He can combine Steam Jets with Steam Dash to fly short distances." ''

This second upgrade provides the player with additional vertical movement, allowing them to perform an additional aireal jump (double jump) and hover at its apex for a short duration. By itself it is already a potent upgrade but when combined with Steam Dash we have basically increased the players movement range two-fold.

Steam Launcher
''"Spaz launches his hand to grapple onto an obstacle and pull him towards it. He can also launches his fist to break objects or hit enemies." ''

The final upgrade brings a whole new type of movement and utility. Now the player can grapple and hang from obstacles as he plan out his next moves and also reach unseen distance and heights. Additionally he can now use the Steam Launcher to break obstacles and hit enemies.

In designing the "Steam Punch" aspect of this upgrade where Spaz will launch his fist at a distance. We wanted to give the player the ability to alter platforming obstacles a little bit to his/her advantage at the cost of some steam pressure. So if the player comes along a series of platforms that has hazards circleing around them the player could choose to spend some steam pressure to knock one of these off a platform and make the sequence slightly easier. This falls along the same lines as Percussive Maintenance for puzzle.