Howdy everyone :)
Hope your 2021s are off to a good start.
Just shipped a chunky update to Hand Cannon.
The big focus of this was on refreshing some of the game's environment art - especially in recurring hero environments like The Lobby. Pretty happy with how the refresh turned out - I'll be trying to apply a similar level of polish to all environments going forward.
What's New
The Lobby - New Environment Art
The Lobby is the hub world where students rest between attempts to climb The Academy.
In this update, I did a huge refresh of The Lobby. I hope you'll find the new environment much richer and enjoy exploring it a bit.
Card Console, Shooting Range, and Practice Course
The updated Lobby now also includes:
A Card Console that lets you try out the different Cards you've unlocked.
A Shooting Range for you to take target practice with them.
A Practice Course for practicing your maneuvering.
AND a kitchenette with consumable donuts, sandwiches, etc. because robots love donuts
Orientation - New Environment Art
Orientation, aka The Tutorial, is one of the player's first impressions of the game.
I want to make sure it's a good one, so I went through the Orientation environments and tried to add more details. I think the end result is more visually appealing and does a better job of establishing the game world.
Game Menu - New Environment Art
The Game Menu is the first environment you see when you launch the game, so I decided to apply some of my learnings from the other updates to it as well. I think it's a lot more visually interesting now :)
Other Changes
Overall the new environments + the Shooting Range and Card Console made up the bulk of this update, but I made some other changes as well:
- Tuning of post-processing effects to get better visual results.
- New lightmapper + some tweaks to achieve better lighting results.
What's Next
My upcoming focuses over for the next couple of updates are going to be:
- Bug fixes and polish that I owe some players who have filed reports :) Thank you for making time to file those reports. I wish I could clone myself and address them all really quick lol.
- Allowing players to swap the order of Cards in their Library.
- Two new Floor Types. Still playing around with ideas to see what my favorites are.
- New enemies and maybe a boss to go with those floor types.
- New narrative elements like NPCs to meet while climbing, inspectable objects that reveal lore, etc.
Thanks and hope you are having fun.
As always, if you have any thoughts, questions, or issues, please don't hesitate to get in touch with me via the Discussion Forums or Discord.
Best,
Tadatoto