Every weapon evolves: swarmr's guaranteed 5th-pick upgrade

What shipped

Every weapon evolves now. Each weapon has a level cap: four stat upgrades, then a fifth pick that is a one-time evolution. WeaponState grew level and evolved flags, and rollUpgrades is level-aware, dropping a weapon’s stat cards once it’s eligible and slotting in its evolution card.

Five evolutions, each a branch in an existing update*() system. Dagger becomes Thousand Fangs (three parallel daggers, 0.05s cooldown). Whip becomes Reaper (alternating front-back-front at extended reach). Garlic becomes Black Aura (1.6x radius, 3x damage). Axe becomes Cyclone (eight axes on a rotating spiral). Laser becomes Prism (forking from each impact point). The same commit raised base laser damage from 17 to 26 and added a dev menu on the backtick key for testing each stage without grinding.

Decisions

The trigger was the real decision. Vampire Survivors gates each evolution behind a specific paired passive, which means prerequisite pairs and a hidden recipe. My backlog item said “upgraded 5 times, then becomes something much more powerful”, so the fifth pick is the evolution. I think VS’s recipes are wiki-driven design. A signature rule should fit in one sentence you can learn by playing.

Two smaller calls. Once a weapon hits level 4, its evolution card is forced into the roll and styled gold, so RNG can’t bury it, but you still have to choose it. And no evolution gets its own subsystem. Each reuses its base weapon’s hitbox, so the whole feature is data plus one conditional branch.

What broke

The guaranteed card collides with the three-slot roll. If several weapons hit level 4 at once, more evolution cards want a slot than exist, and the naive fill silently dropped the overflow. A player owed an evolution would never see it. Guaranteed cards now take priority and extras wait for the next level-up.

Prism shipped as a first cut. Its names and numbers were flagged as placeholders and its fork-from-impact tree was the weakest of the five. Two later commits (ca1bced, 82adf93) replaced the splitting tree with a reflecting beam. Mechanic first, tune second. You can’t balance a weapon you haven’t felt.

Numbers

No dedicated benchmark. Gameplay work only proceeds if the 2000-enemy target holds. Steady state is ~1-2 ms logic and <1 ms render at 2000 enemies against a 4 ms / 8 ms budget, and the evolutions stay inside it because they only add bounded work to existing pools. The one hard number that moved is base laser damage, 17 to 26.

Next

The deferred balance pass, starting with Prism. Then the next phase turns the game from a top-down arena into a side-scroller, which re-aims several evolutions downrange and forces the Axe and Whip reworks.