It's holiday time! Before we wrap up the year we're bringing you a tasty dish of RICE to go with your festive dishes! This patch reworks enemy spawns, blackhole, has a lot of changes, fixes and new content for you to feast on!
If you were thinking about getting the game, now is a great time to do so as we are part of the Steam Winter Sale through our publisher Freedom Games! From December 21st until January 4th, the game will be on sale for 20% off! Make sure to check out Freedom Games' Winter Sale 2023 page to pick up some great games to play over the holiday season.
Additions:
- Idle Screen: Allow projectiles to bounce off the side of the screen! ([Attach Only], Gem)
- Spores: Gain nutrients on killing enemies, when hurt, consume nutrients to heal! (Verdant, Bronze)
- Blizzard: Slow and Shift enemies around you! (Frost, Silver)
- Hail: Frozen enemies shatter when damaged, firing icicles! (Frost, Gold)
- New Candy Map: A new December exclusive map is here that has a 50% chance to appear on the first stage! Collect a bunch of EXP and Metacurrency from the Plants and Rocks around the map!
- Hats Hats Hats! The Player and Enemies will wear Christmas hats during December!
Reworks:
Waves:
Enemies now spawn quite differently before. After 5 seconds, a new wave will start, sending an ocean of enemies at you. The more planetoids you destroy, the bigger waves get! Once you defeat a wave, or after an amount of time, the next wave will spawn, so be quick.
This change increases the amount of enemies spawning per wave by a lot, enemies will also spawn a little more fairly, so you will get a more even spread of enemies.
Slows, Frozen, Frostbite:
Slows have been changed into a flat stacking slow rather than a percentage. If the slow completely negates an enemy's speed, they become frozen! The Ice Shard weapon has changes to reflect this, it now converts knockback into slow.
Frostbite has also been reworked, as the previous version was simply a DOT like Poison or On Fire, which was rather boring. Now instead it's a damage boost for hitting slowed targets.
Blackhole:
Blackhole has been changed to be more intuitive and less self destructive. The first change is that blackhole now never expires, and moves to a set distance away from the player, following the cursor's direction.
The second change is that, instead of spawning a new blackhole that pulls the previous blackhole, each cast of blackhole will trigger the blackhole to deal damage in an area, along with other effects from higher tiers. The visuals of blackhole have been massively improved so you feel like you're properly directing a force of massive destruction!
Changes:
- Antares A's armour has been greatly nerfed and no longer scales based on stage.
- Attacks that go wild due to low accuracy can lose up to 95% of their velocity.
- Endless stage spawns 1 planet per wave instead of randomly overtime.
- Buffed Quick: +10% Speed, -5% Crit Chance.
- Buffed Quicker: +20% Speed, -10% Crit Chance.
- Buffed Quickest: +80% Speed, -40% Crit Chance.
- Buffed Quickness: +100% Speed.
- Resistances now apply earlier in damage function. Resistances will actually be reflected in number numbers now.
- Enemies will now take double damage and gain double move speed once their wave is over.
- Permanently flaming entities such as stars and flaming skulls now only have 90% fire resistance instead of 100%.
- Enemies On Fire no longer get a speed boost.
- Enemies now drop 10x the amount of coins.
- Honey has been buffed (x10 healing) to compensate for coin licker being better due to the above change.
- Monster bone has been buffed (x10 healing) to compensate for coin licker being better due to the above change.
- 'Regrets' Ascension is now 10 damage per EXP, to compensate for Honey being better due to the above change.
- Map props can no longer trigger sparks.
- FPS Saver now causes projectiles to hit enemies twice, rather than deal double damage, so that proc effects are better affected by FPS Saver.
- Weapons now correctly come from the centre of the player, rather than 10 pixels down. So the aiming reticle is now correct.
- Wand base speed was buffed from 4 to 6 Speed.
- Blackhole no longer pulses damage outside of recasts.
- Blackhole pull is now dependant on both Gravity cards and Knockback.
- Blackhole can no longer Crit nor Blunder.
- Enemies currently being pulled by blackhole can not turn into shooting stars.
- Blackhole can now collect EXP and Meta for the player.
- Player stats and Weapon stats are now shown separately rather than at the same time.
- Poison Splash can no longer reach ridiculous levels of damage with 0 effort.
- Player now gets +1 base damage every 4 levels to make things more consistant.
- The abyss is now tankier, due to the player having downtime between waves.
- Ascension level is now based on how many Modifiers are used, rather than based on how many Ascension points are used.
- Wall bounces have been remove from Bounce/Boing, and moved to the new Gem Card 'Idle Screen'.
- Enemies now have a health bar, which also shows what DOTs they are suffering from. Can be enabled or disabled in options.
- Tutorial has been updated and can no longer be cheesed with meta progression.
- CC-Multi bonus from Frost now specifically only affects CC Time rather than CC Effect. It also now applies to most CCs.
- Frozen enemies hit by fire damage take double damage but lose their Frozen/Slow status.
- Slime's Slow has been coincidentally buffed by the slow changes, so it's noticeable now.
- Brute Slow has also been buffed and is a guaranteed death sentence to get hit by them now.
- Fire Brand now has 8 base damage so it will deal damage even if you have 0 Flame.
- Snap has been converted to a [Attach Only] Gold card. 100% damage splash instead of 10% and 25% larger radius.
- You now need double the EXP needed to level up, due to there being far more exp/enemies available.
- Guaranteed Arsenal rate is now every 15 levels instead of 20.
- Poison pulse now poisons enemies after any heal, not just heal pulse. Still requires having poison pulse to show up.
- Chill's meta shape has been changed to better match other frost cards.
- The main menu changes style during the month of December.
Fixes:
- Fixed Fire on the health bar incorrectly showing half the amount it should show.
- Fast Acting now works for all poisons, not just on hit poison.
- Fixed Portal not working under some circumstances after Antares fight.
Dev Note:
Thank you all for your patience! This has been a long patch and is months of me analysing and fixing the game and trying to figure out why I was no longer enjoying it. I've changed a few of my views regarding the game, and I've committed myself to progressing it in the best way possible going forward. I will be balancing things more about what I find fun, rather than trying to keep everything equally balanced. As it stands, this patch has drastically increased the amount of fun I have with the game and I no longer feel burnt out working on it. There are many changes this patch, so I can't offer insight on everything, but I will hit the major points: Waves are the biggest change and took the longest of everything here. Waves fix an inherent problem I was having with the difficult of the game, and provides a natural flow to the game that I had tried creating many times before but failed. Overall this is the greatest improvement I've made to the game so far in my opinion and makes the game far more enjoyable. I do plan to make the wave counter more readable, so this shouldn't be it's final form, but a good start. Another benefit of discreet waves is that I can now have event/special waves in the future, which is something I wanted to do for a while but had no way to do it. I also like the fact you can now see what threats are upcoming, and the system opens a lot more design space in general. I reworked Slows, Frost and Frostbite as I found myself avoiding them every run, it really was just a weaker version of fire. With these changes they feel far more impactful and unique. Snap was changed to attach only because most people weren't attaching it, which is very inefficient as this card benefits massively from being on high damage or knockback cards. Making it gold was a natural change as having to place silver snaps on weapons constantly was annoying. I shouldn't need to explain why blackhole was changed, but for anyone who never used it, it would consistently kill the player, was unintuitive and just felt really bad to use. It's far more powerful and fun to use now, with much better synergies, specifically with attack speed. I increased the metacurrency drop rates for enemies, since pot of meta-gold wholly outclassed anything you got from enemies, so this just brings them more in-line. The buffs to honey and monster bone make them feel like actually effective healing sources now, which is great too. Once again, thank you for your patience! Once I come back from holidays I hope to begin working on a wonderful content-filled patch for you all! See ye then!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2086140/RICE__Repetitive_Indie_Combat_Experience/