We've been hard at work to deliver a cool 1.1 update for Swordship! The main areas of changes are a new "arranged" game mode for our most dedicated players and a revamped progression system for all our new pilots. Plus new upgrades, balancing, readability improvements, new boss patterns and more.
Arranged mode
Swordship is all about adaptation to ever changing emergent situations. In arranged mode those situations will stay the same for an entire week. so you can optimize your run. Here comes a new way of playing the game and beating scores for our beloved high skilled players!
- 3 Lines, 3 Squadrons, 3 Boss phases and weather selected randomly
- All game elements appear in the same order and location for all players
- A separate leaderboard from the original mode
Progression
Progression was a big concern upon release. The “high-score”-only approach was too simple and the menu was confusing. We made the progression more fun by unlocking content with various new conditions. All this comes with a better progression tracker to see all the cool stuff that remains to unlock.
- All unlocks are now split into categories to better readability
- Added persistent unlocks for more variety in the objectives
- We’ve unlocked the “normal” difficulty level from the start for players used to this type of game
- We’ve also given the end-of-run screen a lifting so it matches the updated progression mechanics.
Enemies
Not a lot of big changes here, we mainly tried to improve the game’s readability. We tried to find a good balance between energy and fairness in the gameplay.
- Revert Dasher: decreased the spawn value from 1.25 to 1 point to spawn it more often
- Canonball: reduced the visual of the Ball’s explosions for better readability
- Canonball: now fires 5 Balls instead of 10 to reduce the noise on screen when 2 or 3 Canonballs spawn
- Balls: they explode when they collide with another Ball to balance the above rate of fire time reduction
- Mine: reduced the visuals of the explosions for better readability
- Flamethrower: increased rotation speed to make it a bit more dangerous
- Gunners: the laser flashes before firing for better readability
- Enemies destroyed by an obstacle no longer do area damage. That was too hard to predict and frustrating for many players.
Swordship
Reaaaaadability my love.
- Improved the visibility of the Swordship underwater to make it easier to follow, especially against the boss
Boss
We addressed the 2 big issues with the boss: understanding the “flee” mechanic and the difficulty curve. Introducing a short tutorial and a new phase in easy mode.
- Added a tutorial to explain that you can damage the boss or flee at the end of each phase
- Added an easier first phase in beginner mode to soften the difficulty curve
- The number of phases on the boss transition screen is now shown
- A hint on how to kill the boss is also shown on the boss transition screen
Scoring
Overall, we’ve increased the score given by enemies and by rewards and decreased the score given by multi-tricks to encourage killing enemies quickly by doing tricks instead of letting the enemies accumulate on the screen to do trick combos. Multi-tricks are too unreliable (it’s mostly luck), while focusing on skill with rewards and quick tricks is more in line with the design of the game. We rebalanced the enemies score too to better fit the time and difficulty to trick them.
- Increased the Late Extinguish reward from 30 to 150 points
- Increased the Risky Delivery reward from 50 to 100 points
- Increased the Risky Dive reward from 30 to 100 points
- Increased the Risky Pickup reward from 50 to 100 points
- Decreased the Fire Kill reward from 100 to 80 points
- Added "Wet Pickup" reward (100 points) for a pickup immediately after exiting a dive
- Added “Stun Kill” reward (80 points) for tricking a stunned enemy
- Removed the dodge reward because it was too close to the “risky” type rewards
- Decreased the Double Trick points from 100 to 50
- Decreased the Triple Trick points from 200 to 100
- Decreased the Quadra Trick points from 300 to 150
- Decreased the Penta Trick points from 400 to 200
- Decreased the Multi Trick points from 500 to 250
- Increased the Backiller points from 100 to 150
- Increased the Canonball points from 80 to 120
- Increased the Flamethrower points from 30 to 40
- Increased the Gunner points from 60 to 70
- Increased the Gunnerbeam points from 60 to 90
- Increased the Minelauncher points from 80 to 120
- Increased the Sidekiller points from 80 to 100
- Mines no longer give points and they no longer trigger the "Trick" rewards because that was a projectile earning score. The Lines with a MineLauncher were letting players get too much points. This change helps for a more consistent scoring on all the Lines.
Variants
We tried to rebalance the variants to make them all a viable choice. Rebuild variant was used too much for scoring purpose, which was not our intention. It is meant to be used by players struggling to finish the game. In addition, Bullet Time was almost never played. By decreasing its cost we hope that it will gain more attention.
- Rebuild variant: now divides by 2 the value of the containers to make it no longer viable as a scoring variant
- Bullet time variant: cost decreased to 2 energy cells and duration decreased to 2 seconds to make it more sexy to play
Upgrades
Added 3 new cool upgrades to play with! (and killed a useless one)
- Reinforced front: removed because it was not really usefull after the first hour playing the game
- Delivery Dive: the delivery point respawns immediat ely if you dive to let it be a real bonus, not just an emergency device
- Added "Underwater Collector” upgrade. The Swordship collects energy cells underwater.
- Added "Immune Container” upgrade. The Swordship is immune to fire and electricity when loaded with a container.
- Added "Fire Reload” upgrade. The Swordship progressively regains energy cells when it is on fire.
Difficulty
Same as before, but we’ve added lives at the start of each run to give a little more air to the scoring players
- All runs start with 2 extra lives
- Adjusted the number of simultaneous Flamethrowers on the lines so that it never exceeds 3
Leaderboards
Tell your friend to play Swordship! We have a lot of idea for a game with leaderboards full of players
- We’ve removed the daily and weekly leaderboards because they are not necessary for the moment due to the small number of players.
- There is now also a new leaderboard dedicated to the “Arranged mode”
Game Over
We added THE readability game changer. With this you should always know wich robot bastard killed you.
- Added a freeze frame at game over to make the cause of death more readable. This should make it impossible to think you’re dead when it’s just a regular slow-mo!
UI/UX
The amount of content in the game was not clear enough at the release. A lot of streamers and reviewers didn’t even see the leaderboards and the difficulty modes. We grayed out the locked modes instead of hiding them to be more clear about the content of the game and made a lot of little changes on the interface to better reflect all the content we have put in the game.
- All locked game modes are now shown, but grayed out on the main menu
- We’ve added a score tracker during levels to display the score to beat because it feels good to beat it
- Credits are no longer shown when finishing the game in easy. To see them, you now need to beat the boss in medium or expert. Showing credits in easy gave the incorrect message that the game was beaten, when in reality it was only the beginning
- Credits are not displayed anymore if you don't beat the boss because you’re a coward ;)
- Added some explanations on how leaderboards work during game over
- Changed the order of the game over screens to reflect the new progression system
- Inverted the squadron and weather flag on the level intro to avoid displaying an empty space when no weather is unlocked
- Return to main menu possible from the variant screen
Other
- Energy cells can no longer be collected underwater (that was a bug)
- Added a sound when the “score to beat” is beaten because it feels good
- Fixed a lot of bugs because bugs are bad. Those damn programmers and their bugs
- Added some more bugs to keep my job
- Fixed the UI layout on extra wide screens because we have very rich players
- Various text corrections