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Ninja Kiwi mode

Modification of the base game's "Ninja" mode, to adhere to my brain-off casual desires. (My name is Kiwi, so I called it Ninja Kiwi as a half-reference to the studio.) It's a bit of a hack, mind, but I think it works well enough.

The idea is to make scoring less active and more about just collecting Blocks, while also catering strongly to marathon tracks (like, the main inspiration for this is a 2 hour mixtape-esque track that I play every so often). Grab as many Blocks as you can and avoid Spikes, and don't worry about anything else.

Here are the specific changes:

- Cashing in Blocks now works linearly, 250 points per Block. Worrying about which Blocks to avoid was deeply unfun for me, so now it's 100% optimal to simply collect everything

- Collecting blocks gives points, similar to Audiosurf 1. The first block gives 5 points, the second gives 10, third gives 15, and so on to a maximum of 300. Hitting a spike resets the chain back to 5 points per block. This is to emphasize stealth a bit more, making it meaningful even after you hit your first spike

- Power Blocks now give a flat 4000 points no matter what and effectively do nothing else. They still cash in your Blocks if applicable because I'm too lazy to tinker with that behaviour - given how this mode's scoring works, this doesn't affect anything

- The stealth bonus is no longer all or nothing. It still activates at the end of a track if no spikes are hit, but it also activates if a spike is hit during the track, multiplying the player's score at that moment by 1.25 (the normal multiplier). This is to make stealth matter for scoring even if you don't get the full bonus, otherwise getting a better score between two unstealthy runs feels a bit meaningless. It's to better incentivize avoidance.

- Lane randomization is removed. I agree with the underlying impulse of lane randomization, but in practice it just means that some attempts are easier or harder than others on the same song. The way that the game randomizes lanes is by randomizing every single 'piece' individually, so sometimes you'll get absolutely horrid Spike placement that barely feels reactable, and sometimes you'll get a clear and relatively easy path through. I believe it should have been implemented through generating the whole track, and then randomly swapping entire lanes - this way it should always be the same difficulty, I think, but it still adds a degree of randomization. It's less random, yes, but I think the benefits outweigh the negatives. Anyway I'm not gonna bother trying to implement that myself, so randomness is just gone entirely. Should be fine for a marathon-oriented mode anyway, you're not gonna remember every Spike and Block in an hour long track.


Showing the addition to your score every single time you pick up a Block breaks the score display a little bit, but never showing it makes things too obtuse, so I made it display only every third Block. I hope that's a nice compromise!