HAPPY NEW YEAR!
We hope 2022 has been a great year for everyone. It's 2023 now and we're still working on the patch. This announcement is to share some of the progress updates.
Changes
Difficulties has been revamped.
Easiest, Easy and Normal difficulties remain the same.
Player damage will no longer be nerfed on higher difficulties.
Hard difficulty will require a bit more skill and slightly more grinding to kill enemies. However, the main change is that now enemies will deal 2.5x more damage and enemy bullets now travel TWICE as fast in all aspects (acceleration and speed).
HARDEST/Bullet Hell difficulty is totally revamped. Enemies will now spawn with only 75% hp but their bullets will now deal 10x more damage and will travel 3x faster in all aspects. On top of that players' special powers will be auto regenerated over time and killing enemies will top up the power bar regardless of amount. (that means some enemies will straight up give you 1 or more power bars immediately)
There're exceptions however; enemy bullets travelling upwards as well as enemy projectiles will retain their original speed.
Why Change?
The initial difficulty was incremental towards being harder to kill and therefore swarming the screen with more bullets. However, that wasn't the original design and it DID felt lazy to us.
The purpose of the higher difficulties is to challenge your reaction time, avoidance skills and still being able to counter-fire with or without drift abilities. Bullets will now 99% of the time kill you with just 1 shot for Bullet Hell difficulty. So it's not about having the screen full of bullets but rather bullets being far more lethal and faster.
Progress
We've fixed up to 13 serious bugs so far. Some of them are seriously serious - if not game breaking such as missing ships or ships that spawned but got despawned without any reasons.
Full details will be revealed when the patch is released.
On top of that, the entire Arcade mode has been tested; twice on its default resolution of 1080p in 144Hz. We'll be moving onto doing testing in Campaign and Survival mode next.
4k testing will be broadcasted here - https://www.twitch.tv/jeremylee80 - follow this account to get informed on when we'll be doing the 4K test runs!
So what's wrong with 4K? Apparently, sprites tend to blink a lot more in 4K for some reason that is unknown to us. We suspect it has something to do with the way sprites are rendered because this doesn't seem to occur to 3d particles (ie, Standard Mass Driver cannons fired by 3D UNC Frigates in Stage 1 Arcade).
Conclusion
With the exception of New Year's Day holiday, we've been working non-stop on the patch. Each test run is extremely tiring since I'll need to pick out graphical glitches, bugs and at the same time avoiding bullets and balancing the new difficulty. But we'll do our best to get the patch to you as soon as possible.
Thanks for your patience! We're definitely getting there!
Regards,
Jeremy