New trailer is out, which I spent way to much time working on. What do you think? I have also done lots of playtesting and some nice improvements to the game to prepare for the upcoming Steam Next Fest, which is the next big milestone I'm aiming for. I have also spent a lot of time with accessibility options since I want everyone to be able to play the game the way they want to. If you want you can check out the release notes below:
Demo Release notes
- Added 4 difficulty settings (easy, normal and 2 harder modes that unlock if finishing the game on previous difficulty). The different difficulties change player health, number of enemies per level and boss health.
- Holding fire buttons will fire weapon when reloaded (to avoid having to spam buttons)
- Autofire accessibility option - Makes your primary always fire when reloaded without player input required
- Possible to skip the gem box opening animation by pressing shoot-button
- Color rewards UX changes
- Changed so you have to click a button to interact with the Snail NPCs (instead of walking into them)
- Boss “The Queen and the Hive” added new attack and balancing to avoid spamming attacks
- New upgrade: Crossed Explosions - Makes Jelly Bomb, Slime Mines or Home Pillar explode in a large cross pattern
- New upgrade: Baseball Bat - Makes Splat Blade hit a small slime ball each swing
- New upgrade: Splat Yourself - Passive power upgrade that lets you spread splat around you every couple of seconds
Balancing changes
This is where I need your feedback the most. I'm completely blind to the difficulty, so please let me know if you feel the game is too easy or too hard, and also what gaming experience you have. This is the changes I have done based on recent playtests:
- Bee enemies movement speed increased
- Bee enemies fire delay decreased
- All primary weapons reload speed decreased
- Time between enemy respawns decreased
- 1 more bee-enemy spawn each area on normal and easy difficulty
- Unlocked Hard & Ultra difficulty from the start in demo build
Bug fixes
- Fixed some audiobugs with music not turning off correctly
- Fixed bug that made it possible to trigger double amount of enemies in next area
- Fixed bug that made Splatterang deal a crazy amount of damage
- Fixed bug that game permanently could break if you remapped controls in certain ways (this fix needed all saved remappings to be reset, sorry about that)
What’s happening next? I am eagerly looking forward to the Steam Next Fest where I can hopefully get even more player feedback, and get ready for the final release. Im aiming for a Fall 2023 release at the moment, but let's see how that goes...
