After lowering the requirements for many achievements, I realized that some of these new numbers were still much higher than they should be if someone wanted to get them all before running out of content in the game. Nobody wants to keep playing a game for no reason other than grinding non-combat related stats, so I lowered all the fitting-related achievement requirements substantially.
One of the players (shoutout to Max!) had the game crash when his ship energy was at basically zero during a boss fight, and I have made a couple small code changes to the way energy charges to hopefully address this (I haven't been able to recreate the crash, but please let me know if it happens to you.)
The final boss has had a bunch of its HP shifted around. The total HP remains the same, but the distribution is more even. The Final part of the fight should now last slightly longer but the earlier parts should be slightly shorter.
I fixed the bitcrusher effect on the music that's supposed to happen when the ship is low on energy, it's much easier to tell when your capacitor is low now.
I evened out the brightness of the lighting in all the stages and their backgrounds to be more consistent. As part of this, I removed the ability to adjust the background brightness. The way it was implemented made it nearly impossible to implement a photo mode (one of the things I still hope to add eventually) and it also added a bunch of unnecessary post-processing each frame. I also removed the convolution bloom setting, as I have never quite found a balance of settings that look on average better than the standard bloom and it just tanks performance as well.
As a side effect of this I was able to change the grid under the player ship from a post-process material to an emissive transparent one (because the light levels are all the same now) and that is slightly more efficient.
Frame rates should be more stable than ever hopefully!
Thank you so much to everyone reading this far, I'll have more updates soon!
Until then, have fun - IN SPACE!
-Scott (Coffee Puck Games)