shmups.system11.org

Introduction

Hello guys,

first of all i would like to introduce myself. I come from Belgrade, Serbia, i'm 34 and i grew up playing likes of U.N. Squadron, R-Type and Uridium on C64, then Z-Type, Project X and Xenon 2 on Amiga 500, all the way to Jets 'n' Guns and Steredenn on PC. I have been stalking the forum for a long time, but opened an account just recently, and i decided to open a DevLog thread where i could share the news on the game's development, make someone interested, and above all, help someone by sharing my experience in game development (which proved to be a very serious thing).

Gameplay and features

RHAG is, despite it's name fitting an adventure game better, a more or less classic 2D horizontal scrolling shoot 'em up i always wanted to make. It's a mixture of Jets 'n' Guns (who has the Story Mode) and Steredenn (which is basically and Endless Mode only game). The story features Rick Henderson, a disillusioned galaxy war veteran who turned to suspicious activities after the war to make ends meet, his robot follower, sarcastic Ben who makes every conversation fun, and a lot of NPC's who will be introduced during the development.

Story Mode Single Player - Interesting storyline full of dialogues with interesting characters to keep you amused between levels.
Endless mode with Multiplayer - Local and Online
Daily Challenge - Once per day Endless Mode Run with predefined equipment and perks
Online Leaderboard - Compare your scores with your friends and other players
6 factions - Pirates, Rokh Raiders, Terran Confederacy, Vakshaa, SunDyne Corporation and Paragons.
40+ types of enemies (for now)
30+ types of weapons and upgrades (for now)

Single Player is featuring a shop between levels where you can equip your ship with weapons, drones, engines, utilities, shields and armors.

Weapon types: Ballistic, Energy, Explosive, Meelee. Each type of enemy is usually resistant (partially or fully) to a certain type of damage, so watch your loadout! Ship can equip two weapons, but they can't be fired simultaneously. Weapons also generate heat, so you can't keep that button pressed all the time.

Graphics:

Game is done in pixel art which i really love and which proved itself as (usually) the best choice for shmups due to its clarity (and yes, development costs). I'm not much of an artist, so besides the things i do myself (backgrounds and small art), credits go to Lighterthief, a young lad from Netherlands who does some amazing graphics. I'm often awed how quickly he can make some good looking stuff. You can check his art on his Twitter account: @Lighterthief

Sound:

I've been a musician and sound designer in my spare time doing mostly electronic music for the last 15 years, so i've got that covered. If things turn out well, i might have a surprise artist for music which you all know well, but let's not talk about that yet.

More Information

Website - http://www.fatpugstudio.com
Twitter - https://twitter.com/FatPugStudio
Tumblr - http://rickhenderson-game.tumblr.com
Devlog - https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=59099.0

Currently the single endless mode is in development, after that is finished i will get down to local multiplayer and dailly challenges. The hardest part will be the story mode and online multiplayer which i will leave to be the last.

Here are some pictures, in a month or so i will probably present the video of a gameplay. I see you are a really hardcore shmup community (i've been a non-registered lurker for a long time), so you're welcome to shoot any questions if you have them

Looking forward for the gameplay video, good luck with your development!

A small gif i made for today's #screenshotsaturday on twitter



I'm slowly adding animations and pickups (weapon switching system took a lot to be done properly, but now it's working great yey!)

Hi guys, i just finished a new devlog, it regards the Endless Wave System and spawning of enemies in single prefabs, squadrons and path moving enemies.

The Endless Wave System spaghetti monster i mentioner earlier grows even larger now, but i'm encountering some stuff that needs to be addressed. Since the whole endless thing is, let's say, semi-random (predefined squadrons, random number range single enemies and enemies that move via paths, all spawned randomly based on experience points range and number of enemies on screen with their own "weight" values) the pool seems to small to give a sense of variety.

Here's the picture of a system scheme, pretty basic for now:



You have an explanation on Tigsource Devlog (https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=59099.20) but i'll explain it further here when it is fully complete.



Squadrons

They have the largest number of variety, but they can be painstaking to make if a large number of ships is involved. For example, this is a basic one, Marine Carrier in the escort of five Provokers, six ships total.



Due to Unitys limitation of nested prefabs, i can't just pop them into scene view and save the whole squadron as a prefab (which would be really awesome and speed things up), instead i have a prefab which instantiates ships on defined coordinates in local space. That needs a lot of tweaking, entering values manually then pressing play to see where they are actually positioned. In the whole process, waiting for Unity to start the game to see where the ships are spawned takes the most time. Obviously, the time spent is the largest con, but the pro is that i can simply replace prefabs in the squadron in a blink of an eye. That means i can change those Provokers escorting the Marine Carrier with another ships in only a few seconds, or even set each position to spawn a random ship, thus making the ships following the carrier different each time and even spawn different ones according to the players experience level.

When you take into account around 40-50 ships made until now, you get the idea how tiresome can sometimes be to make all these squadrons, but it keeps the game away from being a procedural generated crap, it keeps the randomness factor but in a structured way.

Random Number Range Single Enemies

Now this is the actual procedural generated crap that is to be avoided, but when used properly it functions great. What does that title actually mean? There are several enemy spawn points scattered all around the screen, by utilizing this approach, depending on certain variables, they will spawn single enemies that follow their own behavior, be it the regular "move forward and shoot" or something else. There are some cool thing regarding this. For example, i can spawn 1, 2 or 10 ships in a random pattern based on the players experience level or number of ships already on screen. They act like fillers, we already have one or two squadrons on screen, so let's drop a few more small baddies that do their own thing. It also keeps the players on toes since they don't know what to expect. A horrible drawback is that things can get too random if not controlled by various parameters that need to be finely tuned.

Enemies That Move Via Paths

I'm sure you'll agree that the game would be very boring if all the enemies would just move forward towards players side of the screen, no matter how many types of them there is. Using paths to move the enemies further deepens the variety and the semi-randomness factor of the game.

Obviously, paths can be used for both Single Enemies and Squadrons. They work great for single enemies since we can set a wave to spawn, let's say, 5-7 small ships and then use a path that's branching, like this:



In this example, when the ships get to the first waypoint (purple square in the upper part of screen) they will do a check which will apply random branch choice, some will keep moving forward towards the left part of the screen, and some will circle around and go back right, or maybe sometimes we'll set them all to follow the same path, so for a path like this, we actually have three outcomes: all follow path 1, all follow path 2, all branch random, which is flexible and great.

Using paths in Squadrons take a bit more time to work on, but they add further variety to squadrons. The Provokers following the Marine Carrier in the first picture may spread or fall back after a while.

Another important option that using paths gives is the easing of movement. Ship may start moving slow, than speed up while moving down the path. Or other way around. That can be randomized to, per ship, squadron, or a whole wave. It gives a lot more natural feeling to movement since ships moving at the same speed constantly may feel mechanical and boring.



Here's how that easing actually looks in game, just played areound, number are not tweaked.







Utilizing all this stuff drives the game away from the classical "memorize the pattern while moving on rails" type of play. It takes a lot more time to work on but definitely keeps every game session exciting and fresh and rises replayability to a whole new level. Unfortunately for some, not using seeds for procedural generation means you won't ever be able to replay the level you played, maybe some other time

Btw, i need your advice experienced shmupers!

I must admit the endless wave system needs further tweaking and finer granulation. My goal is to make an optimal gaming experience, and there are two possible mechanisms i can use utilizing the current system of adding ships' "weight" to a pool.

Every ship holds a different value, small ones from the screenshot are worth 1, and that nasty marine carrier is worth 5. When they appear on-screen, the total value in the pool is 10 (five small ships worth 1, and one big ship worth 5). The pool size is growing with players experience, which increases by killing enemies.

Now, i actually need your help since there are two possible scenarios here.

Scenario 1 - Smoother gameplay, not enough breathing room if you play well

I can do a check of the total pool value in smaller intervals (like a second), and according to total pool value and experience points variable, further ships are spawned, but not above the maximum pool value determined by experience points. For better players that manage to do their kills quick, this will actually provide a constant flow of enemies. For the ones perhaps struggling a bit, it won't spawn enemies as fast. The con to this is having no breaks if you are good, which can be tiresome. I don't plan the levels to be too long (from 30 seconds on the first level to 2-3 minutes on the later levels) and the pauses will be in the form of hyperspace between levels, but some other form of taking a breath would probably we welcome, maybe a subset of waves in the level.

Scenario 2 - More natural progression, more breathing room, risk of not so smooth gameplay

In the other case, i would make a total pool value check a bit more dynamic. When the game starts, the checks can be done every few seconds, and the time between checks can get shorter as the player progresses. While this provides some breathing room between the waves and a more natural progression of the difficulty level, it tends to group everything. If you clear the screen before the next total pool value, the game can throw a lot of things at you if the pool is already at such a level it can hold a lot of enemies.

On early levels, if you are a good player, you will clear the screen in a jiffy and then wait for the next wave. If the wait is too long, it gets boring over time and, like mentioned in the last paragraph, the next wave can be overwhelming.

There's also a possibility of a fixed wave timing, but that sounds boring to me.

Here's a small graph of the system, i think the weight system is the way to go, just need to set the timing right and the prefab pools to avoid overfilling the pool or spawning the same squadrons. I think it's gonna be a lot harder than i think



Array which represent the number of ships on screen will still be in use though, to enable stopping the further spawning when the experience threshold for spawning boss is met. It can also be used as a secondary check, if the pool is not too filled in weight value but there are a lot of small ships on screen, it will prevent further spawning.

But sometimes it won't

Very interesting read!

Scenario 1 sounds solid to me, I would think that for such short levels as you have described (30 seconds+), it would be wise to avoid dead air. Maybe in levels of 3 minutes and more, breathing time might need more serious consideration. This is just a blind guess though since I haven't tried the game, and whatever system you end up using will probably need some iteration anyway.
Looking forward for a demo or longer gameplay sequences in video! It is obvious you have put a lot of effort in this project.
Greetings and good luck.

Thanks a lot, i'll be popping a gameplay video as soon as possible, probably in a few week, there's a lot to do. Thanks for the comments ^_^

Here's a pic of sketches to final product, i usually draw late at night on a tech paper and the graphics guy translates it into wonderful art.



I used to be a techno DJ and producer when i was younger, and i know i shouldn't be doing any sound until i get to the point when the technicalities are finished, but that Ableton icon was tempting me, i haven't started it in two years. So i started making some music for the game. Nothing special really, but that's how i imagine it, i don't like the metal stuff people usually put in shmups, i'm more into Wipeout/Rollcage type of music.

https://soundcloud.com/kruko/rick-hende ... ds-track-1

Well, i've come to the point where creating a vast variety of waves and squadrons is an absolute necessity if i want to test and upgrade the endless wave system. My god it's tedious. With about 30-40 enemies until now, it's gonna be a long work. I made some templates so it's basically dragging and dropping presets and spawn points into appropriate boxes with some tweaks, but still.

Good thing is that it brings me closer to some gameplay videos and demo

I'm still working on my Adaptive Difficulty System, but today i'm having some fun with implementing debris that fly when bigger ships are destroyed



Also, i implemented some composite killables, like asteroid cannons, you can destroy only cannons, or the whole asteroid with cannons. Sorry for twitter link, i accidentally erased gif from my desktop.

https://twitter.com/FatPugStudio/status ... 5851067392

Hey guys, new dev log is out, it's called The Anatomy Of A Roguelike Endless Mode, and it's pretty lengthy with lots of images, so it's better to see it on www.fatpugstudio.com (posts are probably limited do 20k characters, so it wouldn't fit).

Also, i would like to ask you if you have any wacky wishes/ideas of attack patterns for following ships







I got all sorts of regular stuff, bullets in forward shooting patterns, spread patterns, bullets shooting at players last position, dumb and homing missiles, lasers, mines, bombers, homing enemies with huge circular saws, enemies that turn their back on you and start spitting flames out of engine, huge cannons on asteroids, you name it.

Ahoy there! I have some questions/comments.

Is this game mouse controlled? (If not, ditch the player ship inertia.)

The pixel art looks amazing!
How do you choose the colors without it looking messy? (This is difficult for me)

Can't wait to see some proper gameplay!

Hello Mate!

No it's not, keyboard or controller, inertia is 0.

Actually, i pay the pixel artist to do the sprites based on my drawings or ideas, i'm really bad at precise pixel art. Though i am making my own backgrounds, since i've got a more clearer vision on that. Here's one from yesterday, i will probably be doing some color adjustments according to other colors in the game with the aforementioned art guy.



I hope there's gonna be some gameplay in a few weeks, i really want it to be top notch before i put out a decent video!

The most beautiful part is when you can relax a bit and start playing around with art, colors and lights

Good luck with development. Due to its nature Steredenn is my favorite shooter to play when I am not playing anything else seriously.

Thank you. I hope you will like this one too, it's gonna be in the similar vein.

Here's a another, this time some glow and light source automation.

I've been working hard on a scoring system, so here's a new devlog on that, i believe you will find it interesting!

Log 15: Scoring System Design

One of the most important aspects in a shoot 'em up is certainly score. Being somewhat a niche of a genre, it has a clear competitive edge among its players. It certainly lacks fulfillment in terms of engaging story, but the adrenaline rush in combination with the goal of attaining higher and higher scores or even being on the top of the leaderboard is something really hard to beat and is specific to the genre.

With that in mind, a good shmup scoring system has to be easy to understand and engaging at the same time. While it sounds simple, it can be quite hard to achieve a good "funness" factor while keeping it engaging and skill related.

For Rick Henderson and the Artifact of Gods, i dissected a ton of old and new shoot 'em ups in the search for the perfect scoring system i like. One of my all time favorites is certainly Galaga Deluxe (or Warblade for PC folks) for Amiga 500 from late Mr. Edgar M. Vigdal. Besides coins used for shop purchases (which this game won't be using until singeplayer mode is done), in Galaga you can collect gems too. Those little cuties come in different shapes and colors and each one yields a different amount of points. While not groundbreaking, it adds another layer of depth to the game besides dodging as some gems are really worth running for through a rain of bullets. Naturally, tougher enemies have higher percentage of dropping rarer gems that yield higher score addition.



Another form of bonuses that can be picked up are medals. Far from my knowledge, medaling is prominent in shoot 'em ups. The concept is easy: you pick up differently colored medals, when you have the whole set, you get awarded a rank at the end of the level and the medal collection is resetted when you start the next level. You guessed it, ranks are just another name for total bonus multiplier at the end of the game.



There is a total of 9 ranks you can attain (the first being the multiplier of 1, which is your default rank):

Recruit
Private
Corporal
Sergeant
Lieutenant
Captain
Major
Colonel
Marshal
Commander

Complete randomness in spawning those can be infuriating for players with higher skill cap, but i find it refreshing to have a bit of a variety and a possibility for the medals already collected to appear again. Below you can find a weight distribution chart for the medals. When none are collected, the chance for any to spawn is equal. However, as the number of collected medals increases, the chance for already collected medals to appear diminish by 1/5 (or 20% if you like it that way). I haven't done the exact maths, but the chance for already collected medals to appear is not that large. Of course, for collecting already collected medals, you get a nice, juicy score bonus, so they are worth catching too!



Multi kill bonuses! We all played Unreal Tournament 2004 back in the day. It had a nice feature of multikills which i use in my game in a bit different form. For those who haven't played it, you get multikill for killing two enemies in a row without dying. As your kill count progresses (again, without dying) you get megakill, ultra kill and so on. In Rick Henderson and the Artifact of Gods it functions based on time between two kills. When you kill an enemy, an invisible timer starts counting down. If you manage to kill another enemy until the counter hits 0, you get double kill and the timer resets. If you manage to get another one until timer counts down, you get a multi kill, all the way to monster kill. Of course, every additional kill is awared with more and more points. This is usually possible with area of effect weapons (explosive ones) and weapons like Railgun, which can go through multiple enemies, encouraging player to invest more skill in the game.

Grazing bonus is usually omnipresent in bullet hells, a hardcore subgenre of shmups. It encourages the player to "graze" bullets, ie. pass very close to them without getting hit.

Design itself was a bit harder to implement since it involves tracking multiple bullets at a time getting into the graze range and checking whether they hit the player or not.

While not neccessary for the gameplay since i don't want it to be bullet hell, it's one of those things setting apart rookies from hardcore players that want to get the most out the game.

And finally, the good old bonus multiplier which adds up with every destroyed enemy, gets lowered when you get hit, and reset at every waves end. It goes well in combination with grazing bonus, making you get closer to the bullets but not get hit. It also serves as a kind of damage control system. Since i gave up on the idea of having a 0-100 healh bar and chose a 10 life bar instead, hits from tougher enemies take more of your bonus multiplier down.

I believe the score mechanics are very easy to understand and will add up much to the investment of the player and the adrenaline pumping of the true genre players.

The amount of work you've put into this game is simply mind blowing, thanks for sharing all of this with us and keep up the good work.

Thanks!

It's been a few hard months of crunch, so i was really not into writing devlogs, but i will in a few days when i get some rest. There are still a lot of bugs, some debug features are left on screen and i played via remote desktop so it looks like i'm retarded, but i hope you like how it looks for now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNwDRm- ... e=youtu.be

Just wanted to let you know that everything's going well.



I hope you like how it looks! I've got a short demo, if anyone's interested in trying it out when i polish it up a bit, send me a pm!

Sure, I'd play a demo

Here's the latest video, whole first level with 3 waves up until the boss. I don't have much to post, i'm in the tedious part of the project where i make the waves, it's quite boring

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyhx0PRES9o

I didn't read the majority of this, or what's on your site, but one thing that immediately stood out to me was your inappropriate use of the term roguelike. Permadeath and procedural generation are not everything that makes up a roguelike, it's like calling your volkswagen a dragster because they both got four wheels and an engine. Your factually wrong explanation of the term merely leads to more people thinking they know what a roguelike is, which leads to what you see on platforms like steam : everybody slapping the roguelike tag onto their product, and people looking for actual roguelikes having to find the needle in the haystack.

A few comments based on the video :

-There's screenshake for every single impact, which is too much. Either prepare toggle/slider options for the screen shakes or remove them entirely. Some screenshake when a boss or a mid-boss explodes is fine for the dramatic impact, but having it for every single popcorn enemy you destroy is very distracting.

-Think about giving your ship a steering animation when it moves up or down. Seeing a static sprite move alongside the X and Y axes without any animation makes it seem more like a mouse cursor than a physical ship, especially with the analog-looking movement. The animation does not even have to be super duper complicated with tons of keyframes. As long as you show the ship rotating a bit, it should be fine. That kind of small tweak can really help a lot with the feeling you get from playing the game. A static player sprite or 3D model feels much more lifeless, and given that you spend the entire game with it, it's kinda important to get that right.

Here's Darius Gaiden for reference :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K21gKZN3vu4&t=11m03s

-Be really cautious with enemies spawning from behind. They can be very easy to mess up because the player can't shoot them and they spawn where he usually is, so them feeling unfair is highly likely. What I suggest if you want to keep them is disabling their collision hitboxes when they are still on the left side of the screen. Thunder Dragon 2 does that for most of the enemies that come from behind and it works well. Actually, there's one enemy type in that game without this safeguard and it gets annoying in one of the later stages.

-While the first showcased weapon is rather fine though a bit narrow, the others seem to be very lacking in power, resulting in enemies that take ages to kill even though they are super tiny.

-The mine dropper enemy seems to have a lot of health for an enemy that's so small. If it is supposed to be invincible, it should react differently to shots to show it is impervious to attacks. Also, some of the other enemies seem to have way too much health, most notably as the weapon container.

-Some enemies move very slowly. Buffing their speed a bit would add some dynamism to the game, which looks pretty slow here. It's fine to be a bit slow and methodical if the game is built around this (example : R-Type), but here it doesn't seem to be the case.

Overall, I like the artstyle and feel that it can potentially be a fun game but you need to balance it quite a bit and increase its tempo before getting to that point because right now it has too many euroshmuppy vibes.


Creating enemy waves is one of the most fun parts to me, actually! While adding effects, set-pieces or some features can be rewarding when it's done, I guess the part of me that actually wants to play the finished game is happy when the part of me that creates such game is coming up with new content for him to enjoy.
If you have some workflow clogs that make creating waves a slow process, I recommend you fix that to make it faster and more immediate.

Thanks for the opinion ScrewedUp. I believe you're right, nowadays everything created with some randomness is called roguelike and it indeed does make a mess when searching for something really roguelike. I removed it from where i applied it, it's only endless shooter now.

Lookin' good! No sound yet?

I like some of the telegraphing. For instance the dudes that come from the left. Maybe some advice though: for enemies that come from the left, it might be nice to have some sort of indicator arrow to warn you that they are coming. It kind of sucks being caught by surprise by something you cannot see.

Thanks for the suggestion, i have some other people complaining too, maybe i'll leave it only for the bigger enemies, bosses and the guys that charge with you with huge engine blasts.



You're right about that. I had that in mind, but i also contemplated if i should animate other ships too if i animate the player. Of course, that is out of the question since i'm paying the artist for the graphics. There's also some other problems, like each of the player's weapon on the ship should be animated to rotate too, which is really a lot of work, especially since when i take in account the situation of weapon switching animation while the ship is moving up and down. But i'll think of some trick



Due to some bugs, i currently disabled the indicators for enemies coming from behind, a small hexagon with an exclamation mark which appear in line where the enemy will appear.
It will be back soon.



I'm planning on adding a small random scatter to basic gun, it's a bit overpowered like this. Others do need some tweaking, but there's a thing that you might have missed. There are three types of enemy armors: normal, armored, shielded. If you have seen, minelayer blinks in purple (maybe a bit hard to see because pirate ships are green). That means it only takes half damage from energy weapons since it's armored. When it gets hit by a missile for example, it blinks orange, it means double damage. Red is normal damage.



You have a point, tho that requires either buffing weapons or nerfing enemies, i suppose buffing weapons is easier.



Argh, i don't want it to have too much euro vibe, but i certainly don't want it to be bullet hell.



That's exactly what makes it horrendous, Unity is not really friendly for these types of games (or my skill level is not high enough, probably latter) and each wave takes some time to complete, it's not really drag and drop (tho i hope it will be once they implement nested prefabs).

Thanks for the inputs, i didn't have this much constructive criticism, like ever!

I turned it off for some debugging, sounds are also pooled as it slows down the compiling. For now there are sound effects, i'll turn them on again in the next build. Indicators are turned off at the moment, i had problems with them (they weren't deactivating) but i'll fix them soon and get them back on.

Thanks for the comments guys, it really motivates me!

-Animation : I understand not animating every single ship if it costs you money. Just the player ship is more than enough if you have financial constraints as it is the ship who benefits the most by being animated. I am not too well-versed in pixel animation but I don't think you'll need tons of keyframes. Two per direction should be enough.

-Enemies coming from behind : Yes, a warning is a good way to alleviate the frustration, plus it can look cool and stylish! I can't really tell how your indicator looks in-game, but from a glance at the sprite, I would say it should be a bit bigger. Maybe you can simply apply some scaling animations to it in-game to avoid redrawing it and to help catch the player's attention?

-Enemy armor : Ah, I see! I would suggest tweaking the damage multipliers to less extreme values, because the difference between using an ineffective weapon and a super effective one is fourfold, which is a lot.
How does the armor system work, by the way?
Missile is super effective against armor but half-effective against shield, Energy Weapon is super effective against shield but half-effective against armor, while everything does regular damage against normal enemies? If it's that, it sounds easy to understand, as long as the visual aspect of enemies makes it easy to know whether they are armored, shielded or not. I wonder if it wouldn't make more sense to invert the weaknesses though, as I can see an energy shield being weak to missiles precisely because it was mostly made to absorb energy-based shots and an armored ship take more damage from energy shots because they bypass the physical armor while the missiles can't as they also are physical.

-Euroshmup feeling : It's good that you don't want to make a euroshmup and are aware of their flaws! Besides, you are pretty early in the level design process so you won't have to re-tweak an entire game's worth of waves. In your case, boosting the general pacing and tweaking the weapons can help a lot and it's easier than having to retweak an entire euroshmuppy game system with shops, lifebars, inertia and stuff.
Besides, euroshmup and bullet hell are not mutually exclusive shmup types that would be on a linear scale. You can theoretically have a euroshmup bullet hell with inertia and lifebars. That also means you don't necessarily have to increase the bullet count to avoid making a euroshmup. Tighten up the pacing, don't draw out small enemy encounters, don't repeat your enemy waves to the point where it feels like artificial padding (some repetition is good though if well-balanced and spread out), build a good variation of small, mid-sized and big enemies that work together and don't behave the exact same way, and you should have a decent level.

-Enemy wave creation : I agree that it can be a bit tricky to make it easy to do with Unity's default tools. That said, it is not impossible. Kinda tooting my own horn, but I spent some time and several revisions before coming up with a system and architecture that allows me to create waves quickly and i would say the investment was worth it.

What I have in my game is a system where every enemy type has its own script and behavior, and a wave is not much more than an array which cells contain the following information :
-Enemy type (enum)
-Frame spawn (int)
-Spawn position (Vector2)
For each wave, the game controller simply checks each frame if enemies should be spawned, and if they do, they will be spawned at the given location. Then the enemies just do their own thing until they die or leave the screen.

As a result, I can use the default Unity array interface to create a wave in seconds, as all I have to do is select the enemy type from the enum dropdown and fill a few boxes with the other data. This works in my case because every enemy type will have the same behavior and movement. I don't have to input the enemy's full path and animations and bullet patterns because they are not unique to an enemy instance, but common to all instances of an enemy. If I really want to have variations in behavior, I can create variations of a same enemy object and give its script slight tweaks, but they will be treated as two different enemy types by the enemy spawning system.

At first, I had a system where I had to provide the path on which an enemy would move but I thought it was odd to have the same enemy potentially move in widly different ways depending on the wave it is in, not to mention it took me ages to create waves.

See if decoupling the enemy spawning from the enemy behavior can work out for your game. In any case, you'll want to create some sort of editor to create waves and to arrange them in the order you want in a level. That may sound kinda tedious at first and you'll have to think of an architecture that fits your game (mine does not take into account fixed ground enemies for example as I don't have any and the game is purely wave-based) but I can guarantee that once you have one that is efficient, you'll make some quick progress.