In the past several months we have shipped many major updates to Athena Crisis.
Messages
Athena Crisis now has an elegant real-time messaging system built from templates, tags, and conjunctions. Players can communicate during a game, and help others with hints even across maps and campaigns. Popular messages will appear the multiverse to guide (or hinder) players. Messages that are liked often glow in gold, and the author receives a Chaos Star which they can use in the shop to buy unlocks.
New Campaign
The new campaign, Waking the Colossus, by player iudiciis has been promoted into Curated Campaigns. The maps are well-designed, allow you to earn extra stars and you unlock a new unique skill at the end. Athena Crisis now features six curated campaigns and it’s been awesome to see so many content creators expand on the lore of the main story and its characters. There are many more curated campaigns coming that will keep you engaged for a long time!
Experimental Replays & Time Bank Timer
In order to support the still young and evolving competitive scene, we have built a Replay feature. After a game concludes, you can instantly step through every action in a game, or sit back and watch the full replay.
The existing real-time timer for live games gives each player a specific amount of time per turn depending on how many units they are controlling. This system often gives players too much time, and can lead to stalling.
We launched a new timer system for invasions and PvP games that carries over across turns and counts down, with an increment added each turn. The new system makes real-time games go much faster!
Teleport Fields
The Spaceship biome now features 6 individual Teleport fields that can be used to teleport your units across a map quickly. Each of the colors is only linked to Teleporters of the same color. Teleporters enable a few fun interactions, like dropping a unit from a transporter or spawning a new unit on a Teleporter to instantly transport them elsewhere!
Quality of Life
Undo Actions: Up until recently, Athena Crisis only allowed undoing the whole turn. This worked well, and gave each action especially late into a turn a lot of meaning, but it was occasionally frustrating when moving a unit to the wrong field, especially on small screens. In addition to undoing a turn, you can now undo every action up until the beginning of your turn.
Replay Completed Levels: We implemented many requested features, like previewing the next campaign map and the ability to replay campaign maps at any time instead of just at the end of a campaign.
Performance: We deployed major performance improvements which will keep your computers cool, your batteries lasting longer, and your frame rate high. Athena Crisis is now faster than ever.
What else?
- Invasions and skills were further improved and balanced. Some gameplay issues that stuck around for a while were also fixed, like the AI’s behavior in the Space biome, or how the Space biome handles entering and leaving a spaceship.
- We fixed more than 100 bugs and shipped over ten QoL improvements, new settings, and fun features like character silhouettes.
Silhouettes are a cute feature for storytelling in community campaigns! Speaking of campaigns – we are soon launching a new Curated Campaign and multiple new units. Watch out for even more updates!
Finally, we made dozens of improvements behind the scenes to ensure the Athena Crisis tech stack stays modern, bug-free, fast, and maintainable for the long-term. Since Athena Crisis is open source, we want to keep the codebase current so that developers can study how the game is made and build their own modern JavaScript-based games. Check out the source code here: https://github.com/nkzw-tech/athena-crisis
Join our Discord to get the latest news even faster: https://discord.gg/athenacrisis