The Early Access release is upon us! I'm happy to say that the game is slightly less janky than before! This update comes with a lot of bug fixes, some new last minute additions, and some major balance changes for the early game. I greatly appreciate the help I've received from my testers on the Discord channel. Every bit of feedback has been extremely useful, especially as the launch approaches.
Major Features:
- Event Rebalance! The events have long been an issue for gameplay balance. Either they were way too easy or way too hard. In this most recent iteration, they should overall be more balanced. There should now be less waves, but more enemies per wave. This way, they should be more challenging and exciting without being too punishing. I'm sure this will have to be tweaked further in the future, but for now I think it's a net positive change.
- A New Unique Bot, the Spike Bot! I've added a new bot that's a derivative of the Ram Bot with some highly buffed stats. It's hidden somewhere on the map (I think it's really obvious, but you decide that).
- Spitter Enemy Buff! The spitter has long been a favorite enemy for me, but they felt too simple. To remedy a bit of this, I've made them have more variety in attack patterns. This means more jumping, further jumping and in the case of the agile and corrupt varieties, air attacks! They should be a much more deadly enemy if underestimated!
New Features:
- Added a new options to the options menu to hide all of the HUD. This is mostly for my personal purposes for gathering footage, but I know that there are some that will want to hide the HUD for their own immersion.
- Upgrades now have descriptions to hopefully help with understanding how they work. I've seen several playtests where the upgrades were tossed aside as a broken thing. THEY DO WORK! I swear!
- After some feedback about the Storms, I've decided to make them a bit less mean. Now, whenever you're doing an event, Storms should now enter their flee state and peace out while you finish your event. This may change in the future, but for now, it's much more fair to the player.
- Made beetles drop slightly more Energy Fragments to hopefully help with the early game.
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed bugs that were causing both the Player's and Allies Cores to fully reset on death/reloading the game.
- Made the main menu look slightly better.
- Hid all of the transfer bot menus and text because they're not ready for release just yet. There's honestly too many bugs with lost items and stuck bots. This feature will likely have to be fully reimagined for it to work as good as I imagine in my head.
- Fixed various quest skips that a player could do. Now you should be able to complete the quests in whatever order without it getting broken.
- Fixed a bug in the launch version that was not allowing the player to research past Medium-Tier.
- Fixed the tutorial room's floor texture.
Launch is tomorrow! I've been excited and nervous all week, but today I'm very calm. I think it's either that I'm mentally exhausted, or I'm confident that the game's in a good place overall. Either way, it's nice to finally see the first finish line of many. I know personally that the game has a long way to go until I personally can call it complete. That being said, from all of the feedback I've received and all of the playtests, I'm confident that the game is at least worth a try.
Thank you to everyone who's supported me through the development. It's been tough making everything solo, but at the same time I've never been alone thanks to you!
Enjoy the game and look forward to the upcoming updates!
- Jason (Candlebird)