Additions:
Custom shadows for enemies, makes the enemies easier to spot when they are in shadows but also increases their contrast when it lit areas, and allows us to remove them from the standard light layer getting us a small performance advantage to boot.
Rollo is animated!!! re-wrote Rollo's animation manager, now he turns and strafes with the ball, also has a new run animation when the ball is at max speed.
Added a new trap type to the levels, there are explosive traps on the levels now, but they don't damage you just the enemies, they will launch you up into the air though, can get you out of tricky situations.
Fly cages now have a chance to spawn inside fire nests, the fly cages are still getting tweaked and aren't final, we want to add special mechanics to free the flies.
Loading screen, added a very simple loading screen for between levels and fixed a couple of backend bugs that were popping up on scene transitions (also looks better).
Health ball mesh and effects, there is a new health ball and effects have been fixed up.
Shield ball, the shield ball has had a rework now too,
Bunch of new sound effects and bullet effects.
Huge amount of backend optimisation changes, we've managed to get the game file size down to 500mb!!! which is huge!!! or not huge, small!!!
Bug fixes:
Effect laser wasn't spawning it area effect, there are a couple of rare blue laser types that can spawn a static explosion on crit, the code was dependant on an old system that was made redundant months ago, now it works... and can be very powerful.
Fixed kill counters scale going negative, when getting lots of kills very quickly there was a chance the kill counter scale would get swapped to negative values, but now if you are getting heaps of kills over a short period of time the scale can get really huge, we could cap the scale but it's kinda funny right now so we're leaving it.
Fixed a rare bug where quitting a run while in the upgrade menu would cause the upgrade menu to break on the next run.
Fixed enemy rigidbody mass, some small enemies had higher mass values than larger enemies, (this is separate to the bullet penetration mass check), it was causing larger enemies to be pushed around by smaller enemies, or the other way around.
Fixed audio not playing on overkill effect.
Fixed the correct manufactures lists getting populated when swapping weapons factories from storage.
Fixed UI scaling for Steam deck and ultra wide monitors, now the new UI will look more consistent on various monitor sizes.
Balance changes:
Increased effectiveness of most large and extra large bullet types, they have had their damage increased by 15-25%.
Massively increased effectiveness of damage over time effects, added 2 extra ticks and doubled the speed at which it affects the enemies.
Buffed magnet range from EXP magnet factories, we realised they weren't as good to upgrade as just getting better efficiency.
Lots of adjustments to epic and legendary parts, some parts weren't nearly as good as others and felt underwhelming for such high level parts, bunch of cores have had their damage increased or boosted crit damage. there are weapon builds that can now hit crit damage values of over 40K :D
Changed the Re-roll behaviour slightly, now after upgrading a gun it locks the re-roll so you can't keep upgrading the same gun, we'd like to hear feedback on this, this current system was how we planned to do it but isn't as strong as it was before.
Stuff for next update:
Final level and final bosses, we have models and animation in now for the final boss, we just have to polish and fix the final level. the ant Queen is not far away and will be a significant threat.
Thanks everyone!