Update 5 is almost here! We've spent the last three months laying the groundwork for a much more repayable campaign with new ships, worlds, side objectives and reworked weapons, lets take a look at what's inside:
- New Maps: Stages 2-5 now have random alternate worlds, a big part of our work the past two months has been making it easier to add new content. Expect the campaign to get much more variety in each run as we add new stages and missions throughout the year.
- Side Objectives: Each stage now has randomized events and side objectives. Some of these will grant bonuses, others may make your mission harder if they aren't completed. Our intention is to provide interesting challenges that make each run unique, getting the balance just right will be a challenge but we think they'll make a big difference in replayability.
- Ship Stat Modding: You can now mod the health and movement attributes of ships using .json files. We'll be working on moddable weapon, ability and world stats in the future, but the ability to mod in entirely new ships is probably out of scope.
- Computer Player Slot Control: Previously the game would fill with computer players on match start so that each team would have an even six. This helped with scaling the difficulty but there wasn't any UI feedback outside the tab/score screen. You can add or remove bots now, and we're working on more UI feedback so it doesn't just look like ships are randomly appearing in the campaign.
- Ship Improvements: Another iteration of the flight model for ships as well as improvements to weapons to make fighters much more responsive, the Boxer and Dragon bomber especially get a lot of work on their primary weapons.
- UI Improvements: We've added help text for each ship, weapon and ability in the game. Background work has also been done for mission scripting and in game dialogue that will enable us to do a proper tutorial and make it much more clear where to put your attention.
Update 5 will be hitting the beta branch next month, thanks again to everyone who's support in Early Access has made all this possible!