I'm working on an endless wave-based arkanoid/space invaders style hybrid. Bricks spawn above the screen and move down line by line. You must destroy all bricks before they hit the bottom of the screen. There will be multiple types of bricks and random power-up spawns. Currently I am just using a simple Log function that takes in the current wave as a parameter. This works to increase the number of bricks spawned each wave, but I want to find a way to make this much more complicated. Here is a list of everything that should be effected by the increase in difficulty:
1. Number of bricks
2. Types of bricks (1 hit bricks, 2 hit bricks, 3 hit bricks, etc.)
3. Speed that the bricks move down the screen
4. How often power-ups spawn
The biggest problem here is that I can't just increase all of these with each new wave. If I did that, it would quickly become far to difficult. What I would like is an algorithm that gives some amount of variance in the increase between all 4 of these. Say one wave we put 60% of the increase to number of bricks, 20% increase to power-up spawns, 10% to types of bricks and 10% to speed of bricks. But on the next wave those percentages are all moved around and we now have say 105% to work with so the overall difficulty has increased as well. The different types of bricks need to also change to the point where if someone has made it to a certain wave, such as wave 50 for example, there are no longer any 1 hit bricks. We now would have just 2-4 hit bricks, and if they are crazy good and make it all the way to round 100, Now it's just 3-5 hit bricks, etc.
If anybody has any good ideas or suggestions on this, I'd appreciate anything you've got! Thanks!