Patch 1.04 "The Unexpected Update"
Hello everyone! It's been just over 4 years since Metal Swarm Infinity launched, and to be honest I never expected to release any more updates to the game following Patch 1.03 all those years ago. But as it turns out, I finally completed the achievement for beating Level 50 in De
Hello everyone!
It's been just over 4 years since Metal Swarm Infinity launched, and to be honest I never expected to release any more updates to the game following Patch 1.03 all those years ago.
But as it turns out, I finally completed the achievement for beating Level 50 in Deathwish Mode (only took 4 years) and got the 10,000 Bugs killed achievement at the same time!
But after doing so, I was incredibly disappointed to find that a couple of the achievements weren't actually unlocking properly which prevented me from finally unlocking the Total Mastery achievement on Steam (for unlocking all 40 in game awards).
Now as you all know from playing, Metal Swarm can be quite a challenging game, and Deathwish mode is the toughest challenge in the game (there's a reason why finally beating it has taken me 4 years worth of attempts) so after finally completing it, there was no way I was going to let one of the other achievements keep me (or any of you) from unlocking that golden ship skin or the coveted 100% Mastery Achievement, so I dived back into the code to figure it out.
Obviously from the fact you're reading this patch announcement, I fixed the broken achievements but whilst I was in there I noticed a few other things that I wanted to tweak or make some improvements to.
So here's a quick breakdown of what's changed:
Bug Fixes & General Changes
Fixes for various achievements not unlocking properly (as mentioned above).
Numerous changes to the Pr3dat0r boss including fixes to it's shield not always appearing correctly, re-enabling the charging vfx on his cannon and a few mechanical tweaks to his behaviour to make his fight patterns a little easier to understand and read.
Standardised the "invincibility frames" period where the player is immune to further damage (after getting hit) and increased it from 0.5s to 1.5s to make getting shot by those pesky bugs a little more forgiving.
VFX & Particle Improvements
New Particle Effects for the Power Cores - Collecting a Power Core as your prize for taking down one of the bosses is a pretty big deal, and with some new shiny particle effects the power cores
Improved Visual Effects on the Plasma Beam - The Plasma Beam secondary weapons was one of the last weapons we added to the game which meant it didn't really get as much love as some of the other weapons, but that's all changed with this patch. The charge up particles have been reworked to more accurately match the colour of the Plasma, and the beam itself has had additional particle effects added to really make it feel like a beam of deadly concentrated plasma.
Overhaul of the Wave Generation System
When the game launched there were 26 different possible options for how a wave of bugs could fly around, and 18 different variations of colours the bugs could spawn as (10 Solid Colours and 8 Mixed colour patterns) giving a total of 468 different possible waves. As part of this update I decided I wanted to add even more variation and try and really live up to the "Infinity" part of the game. To do so. I went back and doubled the amount of colour variantions and added in a bunch more movement patterns, raising the total number of different possible waves to just over a thousand* which admittedly is still not quite infinity but is a huge increase from the previous total of a measly 468.
Powerup Changes and Rebalancing
Seeker Shot - One of the things I noticed whilst going for the Deathwish achievement was that after unlocking the Ammo Capacity upgrade, the maximum number of Seeker Shot missiles you could store seemed suspiciously high, I had enough missiles to blast through 5 or more waves of bugs without even needing a reload and as it turned out there was a typo meaning the max ammo capacity of seeker was being tripled instead of doubled, which i've now corrected (you can now store a maximum of 60 shots instead of 90).
Plasma Beam - The other thing I noticed, especially after doing the visual upgrade on it, was that the Plasma Beam still felt very underwhelming for a weapon that you only got to fire once per powerup collected... It didn't even last long enough to sweep across the whole screen and clear a wave of bugs!? So obviously that needed some rebalancing too. With the release of this parch each Plasma Beam will drain less power per second, giving you more time to sweep across the screen and fry all those bugs, and the maximum amount of "ammo" you can store for it has been corrected to 100 (Enough to fire once) or 200 (enough to fire twice) with the Ammo Capacity upgrade, and the Plasma Beam is now finally the deadly screen clearing beam I always intended it to be.
Steam Sale (75% Discount)
With all these changes there has never been a better time to fire up the game and kill some bugs and with a 75% discount during the Autumn Steam Sale, there has never been a better time to share the game with a friend or anyone else you think might enjoy mowing down hordes of killer robotic bugs.
Final Thoughts
Finally I wanna end this post with a massive thanks to every player (new and old) who took the time to check out the game, if it wasn't for all of you then I wouldn't be releasing a patch for the game 4 years later. I really can't put into words how much it is appreciated to see people enjoy my games. That being said, there is one last thing that I would appreciate! At the time of writing, the game only has 2 reviews recognised by Steam, which means it has almost no visibility on the store (except when it's heavily discounted during Sales)... if you've been willing to spend this long reading my ramblings, then a couple more minutes just to leave a quick review for the game could make a huge difference! Just getting to 10 reviews would be a massive boost to the game's visibility since that's the minimum needed for it to start showing as a positive reviewed game, so please... if you haven't left a review already, I'd really REALLY appreciate it if you did.
That all being said, thanks for checking out Metal Swarm Infinity, enjoy patch 1.04 and I hope to see more of you unlocking that 100% Mastery achievement!
- Nutter
*1020 different possible wave variations if you're looking for specifics!