Folks, you now have a new special ability at your disposal: Invincibility! Quickly press [LB, RB, LB, RB] and your avatars will grow bigger, faster, and indestructible for a little while, allowing you to cheerfully bump into all those pesky enemies without a care in the world and watch them pop!
This is the most defensive of the four abilities and it's quick and easy to activate, too. The trade-off is that your multiplier won't apply to points you score this way. It represents the opposite of the Spinning Beam on the risk-/reward-spectrum and thus is also particularly well-suited for new players.
This completes the set of special abilities planned for the 1.0 release. However, additionally to fine-tuning balance aspects of the abilities themselves and polishing some parts, I also have some ideas to evolve the power-up economy. Mainly, I'm thinking about letting players customize their load-out a bit. I'm also considering moving away from the fixed-schedule, semi-random-selected spawning of new ability power-ups.
Since the special abilities have a significant effect on balance, the leaderboard has been reset. Like previous resets, the old leaderboard is preserved (Community Hub --> View Stats).
As always, the previous version remains available for download under the correspondingly named branch.
Check out the full change list below:
New Features
- Added Invincibility ability. Press [LB, RB, LB, RB] and see what happens :)
Balance and Other Changes
- The Stun ability now paralyzes enemies for a longer duration. This provides a more meaningful respite and helps balance it against the similiar Invincibility.
- For now, you start out with 2 charges for each ability. This may change again in future updates as I tweak the power-up economy.
- Slightly changed controller behavior, see the detailed example below.
- Modified some special ability icons to better align them with their corresponding input gestures. Ideally, the icons will help new players remember how to trigger the abilities.
Bugfixes and Polish
- Fixed a bug where the Spinning Beam Power Up would never spawn, random system would always pick one of the other two.
- Fixed a bug where the Stun Ability sometimes would end too soon.
- Fixed a visual bug where the "screen wipe" beam would pass under the avatars instead of over.
- Changed the flashing light effects when one avatar is dead to something less seizure-inducing.
- Avatars now always match the position they had in the main menu and post-game menu when hitting Retry/New Player.
- Added various animations to the "Start" button in the pre-game screen
- Added various animations to menu buttons.
- Added color transitions between screens.
Controller Behavior Change
Example: The avatars are within linking range and the player presses LB to connect them with the blue laser. Keeping LB pressed, they also press RB, now changing the laser color to orange. Then they let go of RB again, still keeping LB pressed.
Previously, this would disconnect the avatars, despite one button still being pressed. Now, it changes to that button's corresponding laser color (blue in this example). If your finger tells you you have your avatars connected, then that's what should happen.
In Co-op, this change does not apply, because here it's more important that players be able to break free from unwanted connections by briefly tapping their button and letting go again.
What's next?
I'll be exhibiting MODSORK at EGX Rezzed in London this week, so I please bear with me if I'm slower to respond. When I return, I'll start working on Progress Mode. It will consist of a series of discrete challenges players can complete (as opposed to the other modes' open-endededness) and unlock loadout customization options.
