Feature request: Permanent laser/ship upgrades

[pastthepixels]

Beside regular upgrades that deal with how much damage lasers do/how much health your ship has, an idea could be to split the upgrades screen into two tabs: one for regular upgrades and one for laser upgrades. These upgrades would be fixed, so not randomly generated each time the upgrade screen is shown, and you would only be able to equip one upgrade at a time. For example, there could be an upgrade for firing two lasers at once or three lasers in different directions, and you could purchase both, but you could only equip one for the next level. This could also work for the ship too, where for example you could have an upgrade for shields.

EDIT (2023-01-31):
Here's just a quick checklist I'm going to put here so I know how I should tackle this:

• Create a label for each "enhancement" (what I'll call permanent per run upgrades) and integrate it with the Upgrades screen (ex. adding a tab)
• Create a global array which has all enhancements and can be saved/loaded (we will change the state of some as each run progresses)
• Implement the label/GUI with the array (so you can purchase items and have it affect the global array)
• Implement equipping enhancements
• Implement a weapon switcher for laser enhancements
  • GUI
  • Create slots/update the GUI with names of equipped weapons
  • Get a way for Player.gd to see what enhancement is equipped
• Add extra lasers in the player's ship to be used for certain enhancements (using LaserGun for different weapon types and Player/LaserController to be an interface to all the LaserGun instances in the ship)
• Add extra laser types and develop enhancements to be used with those
• Implement laser enhancements
• Implement ship enhancements

[pastthepixels]

An idea can be to have a bunch of possible weapons that you can switch through by scrolling or opening a weapon switcher, but you can only select a certain amount (say, 4) every level.
Here's a list of some of the weapons that I want to add to the game:

• Single shot (already exists)
• Double shot
• Triple shot
  • one straight and two to the side, and
  • one straight and two out of the side cannons
• Plasma lasers
• Homing lasers
• Stationary explosives

[pastthepixels]

and here's a checklist for all the other upgrades I think should be added to the game:

• Adding shields (25% of max health)
• Lowered burning damage
• Lowered corrosive damage
• Reduced freezing time (1/2)
• Start each level with an additional amount of refills

[pastthepixels]

After a bit of testing, enhancements have been added to the game and seem to work fine. There's still the issue of testing to make sure they're set at the right prices, but I think it's good enough to just merge instead of taking too long, and we can just fix this later when there's more playtesting.