The old spawner put one enemy on the map every 3-6 seconds for ever. There
was no rhythm to the danger and nothing to prepare for. Enemies now arrive
in waves: a long quiet, a warning, an attack, and quiet again once the wave
is dead.
The clock lives in GameState, because Main.tscn is destroyed on every trip
to a planet surface and a wave must not be cancelled, nor restarted from
zero, by a landing. The spawning does not: GameState cannot see the world,
so EnemySpawner reads the phase and puts the enemies in it. That also
settles what happens when a wave turns while the player is on a surface -
the wave is waiting in space when they come back.
EnemySpawner keeps its name deliberately. It is still the thing that puts
enemies in the world, and 88 test files already say
`get_node("EnemySpawner").set_process(false)` to ask for a quiet map.
Strength is a function of the FLEET, per the ticket, with the wave number as
a slower second term so a player who never grows still meets escalation. The
budget is spent most-expensive-first, so a large wave is heavier rather than
merely longer, and min_strength keeps the first waves to chasers whatever
the arithmetic says.
"No timer should be visible" is enforced rather than merely observed:
GameState offers wave_warning_pulse(), a 0..1 throb, and no
remaining-seconds accessor at all, so the alert cannot drift into being a
countdown. The test pins both - that no such accessor exists, and that the
alert's own text contains no digits.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A second suicide vessel alongside the chaser, but where the chaser simply
beelines, this one is a rhythm the player can read. It drifts in from beyond
lock_range at half speed, LOCKS a point, rocks 30px back and forth along the
charge axis for 1.2s, draws a thin line down its trajectory for the last
300ms, and only then crosses the gap in one straight 950px/s run before
coasting to a stop and starting over.
The lock is what makes the wind-up worth anything: nothing re-reads the
fleet once it begins, so the charge goes where the target WAS and stepping
off the line works. Same bargain as EnemyBigLaserBeam.
EnemyLungeComponent is a Node2D rather than a plain Node because the
trajectory line has to be drawn somewhere, and top_level keeps that drawing
in world space while the hull it hangs off spins to face the lock.
The roaming spawner gets a 25% lancer share. It is the only place the player
meets an enemy off an authored map, so without that the lancer would exist
only in the setup editor.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
