Love2D values updating too fast

Question

I'm making this game, and it involves enemies. it's pretty boring for them to stay the same speed so I want the enemy speed to increase as the player scores higher. It's difficult to make certain algorithms with love since mostly everything is updated every frame with this game engine. Which is what is actually giving me the problem right now.

The first part of my logic is correct (the part where the enemy.speed increases after the player_score passes 10) but once it passes (or reaches) 10, the enemy.speed value will continue to increase by 10 every frame. Even with the enemiesReadyToSpeedUp boolean that I put in place specifically for this reason! (to stop the enemy.speed from rapidly increasing)

so once the player score exceeds 10 the game becomes unplayable since the enemy begins to move at the "speed of light."

function enemySpeedUp()

    -- Once player score > scoreLimit + 10, enemy's speed will increase by 10, 
    -- and the scoreLimit will increase by 10

    enemiesReadyToSpeedUp = false
    scoreLimit = 0

    if(player_score >= scoreLimit + 10) then
        enemiesReadyToSpeedUp = true
    end

    if(enemiesReadyToSpeedUp == true)then
        enemy.speed = enemy.speed + 10
        scoreLimit = scoreLimit + 10
        enemiesReadyToSpeedUp = false
    end
end

Things I've Tried:

• Writing this function pretty much the same without any booleans. (meaning I increase the enemy's speed once the player's speed exceeds 10. instead of making a boolean true, and then increasing the enemy's speed based off the boolean)
• Hard coding every possible combination in which an enemy would need to speed up. but that requires a lot of if statements, is very inefficient, and is also just in general bad coding practice. but it does work, and I'm actually considering doing it that way if nothing else works.
• Lastly, I also tried enemy.speed = enemy.speed + player_speed but that was a pretty obvious mistake as enemy.speed increased every frame and I got the same result as my first mistake.

Answer 1

Your mistake is initializing scoreLimit with 0 right within enemySpeedUp() function.
Move that assignment out, do it at the same place where you set initial player_score value.