I've been thinking of how I should handle ammo with this.

Weapons will play a big role, with each one opening new areas. I intend to use bouncers, toasters, RF missiles, seekers, and TNT, though TNT obviously won't be until near the end. However, I'm not so sure that scattering ammunition everywhere is such a good idea - it would make it too easy to get things in the wrong order.

An idea I've been toying with is to have it so the ammo pickups are rare and merely serve to expand the max ammo you can carry for that weapon. So, there'd only be around 5 bouncer ammo items in the whole episode (mostly hidden), and each one would let you carry an extra 20 shots (for example). Once you collect one, it's gone forever, so you can't go back and get it again. Think of how the missile expansions work in metroid games. This sort of design works well with open ended projects. It also gives lots of secrets for the player to find: in this case there would be 20 to 25 "expansions" to search for, 5 for each gun.

Also, an added advantage of this is that it would be easy to allow the player to carry more than 99 bullets. The variables can be set to whatever number you want, basically: the 99 limit in jj2 only applies to getting ammo from pickups. Could even balance it so you can carry 500 bouncers, but only 50 seekers.

So the matter of acquiring weapons (and ammo expansions) is all good. But what about the ammo itself? How should the player get more ammunition, when it runs out? Since I'm not using ammo pickups in the normal way, there needs to be another option. Right now I can think of three possibilities:

1. Have ammo "regenerate" slowly, at maybe 1 bullet (for all guns that you have) every 5 seconds, up to whatever the max amount is for that gun. This is an easy solution but I don't like the potential it has for encouraging players to sit idle to recharge. This should be avoided.

2. Have a central store or even multiple stores where ammunition can be purchased. 50 coins for a full refill, or something like that. Problem with this is when you run out, you'd have to backtrack a lot, and that would mean players ration their ammo a little too much. There will probably be a store anyway, but I don't like the idea of forcing it on the player.

3. Use gems. Something like, when you collect 100 your ammo is refilled (either fully or partially). This way I can use gems as a sort of "generic ammo", and also enemies drop them, which is nice. The disadvantage is that this method is a bit... weird. And it prevents me from using them for extra lives (though I may ditch lives alltogether due to gameover being irrelevant in small levels like the ones here).

I'm kind of leaning towards a combination of #2 and #3. I want to know what people think about this though, and especially gems thing: it's strange, but might be fun.