Hello everyone!
This update has been a long time in the making, and there's lots to cover, so I'm going to get straight to it.
RELOADING HAS BEEN REMOVED
You no longer have to reload your turrets. Turrets have unlimited ammo, and can now be loaded with energy (collected from enemies) to charge up powerful ultimate abilities. These abilities are different for each turret class!
CHANGES TO ABILITIES AND HEALING
Abilities no longer have cooldowns, but instead cost energy to use. Each character has a different energy cost for their ability. Healing is now limited to 3 uses per level, but has no cooldown. These uses are replenished on level-up, but there are plans to limit this healing as it's currently quite strong.
Also, Harper's ability no longer disables turrets.
NEW LEVEL-BASED SYSTEM
Instead of waves, you must now power BATTERIES with your turrets. The locations of these batteries are randomized on each level up, but you are able to see all of their potential locations very easily. This ensures that players aren't camping in the same spot the whole game, and also means that there are always enemies spawning throughout the run, rather than the previous wave-based system that got less and less intense towards the end of a wave. Despite this, all enemies are destroyed on level up, to give you a bit of breathing room.
Reaching level 10 will trigger the miniboss (The Enforcer), and reaching level 20 will trigger the boss. The boss must be defeated to win the game.
NEW GAME STRUCTURE
The game now has a structure to it, rather than just a screen with some stage buttons. Now, all the stages are shown on a spaceship deck plan. It's nicer to look at, easier to understand, and provides more information.
NEW STAGE
There's now a Stage 3 (The Recycling Plant) with its own unique boss. It's probably my favourite of the three stages, and you can expect more to come soon.
NEW PROGRESSION
Lore has been removed and replaced by "Starchips", which are the new meta-currency earned through your runs. You can use Starchips to unlock new characters and turret classes. As well as this, completing each stage now unlocks something.
-Beating the Cargo Hold unlocks the Launch Bay and Recycling Plant.
-Beating the Launch Bay unlocks asteroid mining (passive Starchip farming).
-Beating the Recycling Plant unlocks revives (which cost Starchips).
There are more stages planned with their own unique progression, but I am trying to stay as far away as I can from the kinds of meta-progression you tend to see in a lot of similar games, purely because that's something that I myself am not interested in. So you can expect to see future unlocks that don't just have pros, but have cons too.
RELICS
The miniboss, the Enforcer, appears at Level 10 and grants one of three relics when defeated. You get to choose which relic you want, and all three are very different from each other. However, they may be in need of a little balancing.
NEW CHARACTERS
It seems strange to put this so far down on the list, but there's a whole new character, as well as a Corrupt variation to unlock. There's now also a Corrupt variation of Goran for you to try out.
The new character is Big Iron Bill, he has a gun that has a very low energy cost, and some really neat unique upgrades to find in the pool. However, Bill is occasionally hunted by a unique enemy type: Bounty hunters.
NEW ENEMIES
There are 2 new enemies in the game: The Adrenalbot (boosts speed of nearby enemies), and The Cannoneer (slow ranged enemy). These enemies do a lot to spice up the early and late game.
SMARTER ENEMIES
The enemy pathfinding has been completely reworked to... actually pathfind. Enemies will now actually move around your turrets and objects to get to you, rather than running straight at you and ignoring everything else in their path. Pretty neat.
MORE ENEMIES
Low-level enemies now spawn in bigger groups, so there's always a bigger horde around.
BESTIARY
The Lore system has been replaced with a Bestiary which you can fill out as you meet all the enemies for the first time. This should hopefully provide some insight into what each enemy does if you're ever confused.
HARD MODE
Hard mode can be unlocked by beating the first stage. This mode reduces the time that pickups remain on the ground, and increases the frequency of enemy spawns, as well as the chance of enemies being champions.
REMOVED EVENTS
Because of the new level-up system, events didn't really work anymore. I have plans to try and rework them back into the game, but for now, I've simply removed them.
NEW TUTORIALISATION
There is now a tutorial-giver -- The Archmaster. He exists to better ease new players into the game.
NEW SAVE SYSTEM
I have completely upended the save system into something that is much more reliable and easy to expand on. However, as a result, existing players may find that their saves have been wiped. Whilst I do apologise, I will say that this is likely for the best, as the game has changed so much that any progress made is likely irrelevant or could cause issues with the game.
NEW MUSIC
Each stage now has its own unique track, which is interrupted by another unique track when the Enforcer arrives, before going back to the regular stage music. This should hopefully provide a little more variety audio-wise, but I do intend on making each of these tracks longer eventually. There's also a unique title theme outside of runs.
BALANCE CHANGES, UI, and BUG FIXES
Due to the mountain of changes, the balance of the game is a bit up in the air. I'll be working on testing and tweaking the game's balance, but in the meantime, if you have any feedback and or suggestions I'd love to hear them.
Bosses all have a lot more HP, including the Enforcer, so they pose an actual threat now.
The UI has had a bit of an overhaul, I've tried to make things cleaner and nicer to navigate, hopefully successfully. There's also an "Are you sure?" button when exiting a run. Oh, and I added an exit button on the main menu, because for some reason there wasn't one.
A few bugs have been fixed, most importantly a bug where Goran's dash would get you stuck, as well as some issues with the fullscreen toggle. There was also a weird bug where "Vessel" would cause enemies to occasionally become unkillable, which has also been fixed.
THANK YOU
If you made it this far down, thanks for reading! And if you're an existing player, thank you for your patience as I've been working on this update. Although I've done my best to make sure the game is fully stable, there have been so many changes to the game that it is impossible for me to guarantee. If you encounter any bugs or issues, please use the Google form or Discord to provide feedback (links on the main menu of the game).
Thank you for your continued support, I hope you all enjoy the new update!
Cheers,
Spargit