This week brings some audio and visual polish, an expansion to force type weapons, and a fix for those of you with gamepad disconnect issues. More polish, optimization, and the eagerly awaited Difficulty system are up next!
I know many of you have been playing Gunlocked for hours upon hours and are hungry for new content. The new difficulty system in the next big patch this month should provide many hours of new challenge while I work on the final zone and endless mode, which I expect to release in August. I'm working as fast as I can as a solo developer, but there are only so many hours in a day!
A lot of work under the hood had to happen for many of the changes this week, so I expect I missed some bugs. As always, let me know about any issues in the forums, on discord, or twitter, and I'll work to fix them as fast as I can.
Patch 043 Notes
New Pilot: Ram
Ram is a high skill pilot with a unique playstyle. His augment is extremely rewarding to master, and incredibly powerful in the late game, but he can take some time to get a feel for.
- Weapon: Gravity Wave - A forcefield forms in front of your ship. When an enemy is within range, the field triggers, knocking back and stunning any nearby enemies for 0.5 seconds, dealing 15 damage.
- Augment: Blowdozer - Force effects apply an explosive debuff, on up to 5 targets, that deals 40 damage in an area after 1 second or when the target dies. - The blowdozer charges up with movement. When fully charged, its area of effect is doubled.
New Weapon: Sideline
- Type: Force, Beam
- A cannon appears randomly on the left or right side of your ship and charges up an attack. It then fires a 20 damage beam of force energy that damages and knocks all enemies back that it passes through. 4 second recharge time.
New Utility: Feedback Loop
- When force effects hit enemies, the Feedback Loop's meter charges up. When the meter is full, the Feedback Loop will fill the recharge meter of one random weapon by 24%. Works on both timed and kinetic recharge weapons.
Quality of Life
- Updated Victory system and animation - players will now have 5 seconds to collect gems before a new victory animation plays out after defeating a final boss
- New Boss Music now plays during boss fights
Bug Fixes
- Gamepad Disconnect Fix - After extensive testing, it was determined that an incompatibility exists between the game engine I use, the gamepad drivers, and Steam, that could lead a small portion of players to have disconnect issues with their gamepads when changing scenes. A workaround was devised to use an older control extension as a compatibility backup in the event of a driver connection failure. You won't notice a significant difference in the event this happens, but the home button will no longer work, and the game may not auto-pause if your controller batteries die or it becomes unplugged. The game will check at the start of every new scene/game screen to attempt to use the more modern and optimized drivers. There may yet be edge case incompatibility issues, but this solution has solved the problem for every tester I got into the beta to try it.
- Smol Ship Augment should no longer unequip after a game.
- Screenshake should no longer get stuck on if the game pauses exactly when screenshake starts.