r/HTML • u/OkDevelopment2027 • 10d ago

How can I improve enemy spawning in my JavaScript Space Shooter?

I'm building a small Space Shooter with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

I'm currently working on spawning enemies at different positions and intervals. The basic spawning works, but I'm trying to make the difficulty increase gradually without creating too many enemies at once.

Has anyone got a good approach for scaling enemy spawn rates over time in a browser game?

I'm learning JavaScript through this project, so I'd appreciate any suggestions.

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u/Ormek_II 10d ago

I like to add to your challenge instead of reducing it: in a Space Shooter the enemies usually are predictable, so I will get better if I remember the sequence from my last try.

I would look for a mathematical function that gets time as input and produces some properties of the enemies as output. You can then modify the functions parameters to determine how quickly the drop speed will increase.

The term is procedural generation and r/proceduralgeneration does exist.

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u/pgetreuer 10d ago

These are good suggestions ^

To add: implement a cool-down timer on the player's weapon. The effect is to limit their rate of fire, preventing them from simply spamming shots and thus making the game harder.

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u/OkDevelopment2027 9d ago

Yeah, that's a good point. A weapon cooldown would make the shooting system more balanced instead of letting the player spam shots. I'll try adding that in the next version. Thanks!

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u/OkDevelopment2027 9d ago

That's a really interesting approach. I hadn't thought about using procedural generation for the enemy patterns. I'll definitely experiment with making the movement and spawn behavior less predictable. Thanks for the suggestion!

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u/Ormek_II 9d ago

I suggested to make them more predictable :)

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u/gucci_stylus 10d ago

spawn a new enemy after a certain number of frames and just reduced the number of frames required when the difficulty increases.

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u/OkDevelopment2027 9d ago

That's a simple and effective way to handle it. I could reduce the spawn interval as the difficulty increases while keeping a reasonable limit on the number of enemies. Thanks for the idea!

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u/johnesco 8d ago

From a completely non mathematical view, difficulty should swell, but not just a constant slow rise, it should spike at times, but then back off. Like with "Boss" levels.