New Content
New Enemy Spawn System
- Every enemy in the game now has at least 3 variant versions of itself
- Not every enemy variant will be available for the game to spawn right from the start, instead, the spawning algorithm will unlock one new variant every 15 permanent difficulty
- Once a new variant is detected, the narrator will announce its presence if it spawns outside of your camera vision
Synergies
- When two special buildings are placed adjacent to each other, they have a chance of triggering a synergy when they fire.
- About 50% of the possible combinations are valid synergies, have fun finding them all, some are quite strong, some not that much, but every synergy is an upgrade from the original building.
Steam Achievements
- Now every unlock in the game has its respective steam achievement.
- If you had some unlocks before this patch, getting any new unlock or finishing a run should update it.
New Unlocks:
- Aggressive Mob
- Have 120 enemies alive at the same time
- Unlocks Unusual Lubricant Upgrade
- Build them all
- Unlock 8 different special buildings
- Unlocks Minefield Deployer Special Building
- I'm in Danger
- Survive 1 minute with temporary difficulty on
- Unlocks Supply Drop Active Skill
- Aggressive Mob
Minefield Deployer Special Building
- Unlocked by "Build Them all"
- Fills its range with mines, causing damage when enemies come close to them
Unusual Lubricant Upgrade
- Unlocked by "Aggressive Mob"
- Purple Tier upgrade
- Whenever an enemy is killed, reduce all your active skills cooldowns by 1 second each
Supply Drop Active Skill
- Unlocked by "I'm in Danger"
- Yellow Tier Active Skill
- When activated, spawns 1 upgrade drop in the selected location
- Further stacks increases the average rarity of the drop
- Cooldown: 90 seconds
Balance Changes
Temporary Difficulty
- When a building of yours is broken as well as when several other triggers happen, the game enters a mode called "Temporary Difficulty", shown by orangeish/red borders on the screen
- While the temporary difficulty is on, the difficulty is increased and enemies spawn more frequently.
Drop Changes
- Now every drop from the same spiral will have the same rarity.
Tree Changes
- Trees are now always vulnerable, but they are not targeted by your buildings by default
- When destroyed, they increase the temporary difficulty
- Their visual was completely redone, should fit a little bit more with the thematic of the game
Laser Cannon Special Building
- Now increases the damage its target takes from all sources until it dies
- The effect stacks with itself and can lead to monstrous damage numbers
- This effect applies to its synergies as well
Tesla Tower Special Building
- Reduced damage from 100% of its shield to 50%
- Reduced self-damage from 50% of its shield to 25%
Nuke Active Skill
- Unbuildable area is now temporary and deals damage over time to enemies that walk over it
- AoE is much bigger than it was, but full damage AoE remains the same.
- The crater now has new graphics and a tooltip with how much time it will remain unbuildable
Organic Growth Upgrade
- Now prioritizes building adjacent to non-organic buildings
Quality of Life
World Map:
- Now when you hold TAB, you can see a quick drawing of the entire map
- By right-clicking into the said map, you can move your camera there.
Initial Pause
- Game will now start paused and will unpause when the player does any significant action
- There is a sound indicator to tell the player that the clock is now running
UI Changes:
- Basic tile and analyse are now included in the bottom-right part of the UI
- The current prices for every building are now also included in the bottom-right part, rather than in the top-right
- When holding alt, a map of the possible blueprint locations is also shown, the next blueprint is guaranteed to be in one of the 10 cells highlighted
Camera Movement Options
- You can now also move the camera using arrow keys and +/-, this is especially helpful when the player is using a laptop
"Removed" Content
In this patch, some enemies were temporarily removed from the game due to design flaws within their concepts. Some of them should return once I am able to fix every underlying problem with them.
Mobile Wasphouse
- This one was the most problematic enemy in the game in a sense of performance, since it wasn't a boss, several of them could spawn at the same time, each of them spawning dozens of wasps over their lifetime.
- I plan on reintroducing the Mobile Wasphouse as a boss on the next update, I will have to rework it to have more interesting attack patterns since it will take most of your attention once one spawns.
Sandworms
- This one was the second on this list because of how unfair they feel when playing against them, often they took several buildings even after being killed and there was not much the player could do to fight back.
- I plan on reintroducing the Sandworms but completely reworking them in the process, the invulnerability aspect of them will be probably limited to a variant at most.
King Lurker
- The King Lurkers themselves had no design issue but were temporarily removed just due to the lack of a proper boss mechanic within the game.
- I plan on introducing a boss system where the player has some agency about when to spawn a boss, as it will be part of the steps necessary in order to properly finish a run
Optimizations
This section is heavily technical, but Verde tries to explain what should be the impact on the game
Object Pooling:
- An attempt to minimize the time that the garbage collector spends running
- This should reduce the frequency and intensity of the lag spikes within the game
Streamlined Sound Source Management:
- Now sources should be recycled as often as possible to ensure minimal memory usage
- This should reduce how much RAM the game uses in the later stages of a run
- This should also reduce the frequency of the silent crashes since they were usually related to LuaJIT's 2GB ram limit
Verde's Comments
In this update, the game became significantly more difficult, I am aware of that and I plan on lowering that difficulty as I further update the game, But I noticed that for now, the difficulty is kind of necessary in order to give objective to the player.
Feel free to ask in the steam community or in our Discord here if there is anything you feel unsure about.