Beta 9 - Re-strengthening foundations
Developer commentary:
Almost everything was focused purely on polish and setting up the foundations of the new story mode, and for bettering "game feel", whatever that means. A small but effective change I think were the parry visual effect and camera shake, as they give a lot more personality and feedback to the gameplay.
I'm also pretty satisfied with the simple "gene mods cost a flat amount" system we have here. Initially, I wanted the player to be soft-limited by the infinitely increasing cost of gene mods as they took them, but it was just overly complicated and Christian and I decided that simpler was better in this case. Not to mention we now get to make some gene mods grossly overpowered if we want, and just call it a "legendary" to balance it out. We haven't gotten around to that yet, but I think I want to do that soon.
I believe this is also the new demo version. The only reason this is significant is because building for WebGL in order to update it on Itch.io takes literal hours. I hate it, so every time I update the demo version, it's a real occasion. For everyone playing this demo for the first time, hello. It's me, the main developer. I'm typing this right now, imagining you reading this and thinking, "wow this stream of consciousness is getting boring and unnecessarily long at this point". Well too bad. Here's four more words.
-Dan
Story mode specific changes
-All rooms no longer have any "passive" enemy count.
-New squad type: "Sentinel" which is basically just an ambusher that is not hiding.
-Revamped spawn system: all squads have their own deterministic spawns instead of simply adding to the total enemy count of a room.
-Revamped "roamer" squad pathfinding, which attempts to stick in small clusters
-Gene mod clarity cost heavily increased but no longer scales. (Testing this much simpler system)
-Limited lowest clarity to -1000 in order to take any gene mods
-In story mode: easy/medium/hard/insane scales clarity gained by 0.25x/0.50x/0.75x/1.00x for a more interesting tradeoff. Raw stats in exchange for potential power.
Gameplay changes
-Added low stance "downpunch" finisher, dealing 75x2 damage but is slightly slower than the 100x1 stomp
-Finishers are now bound to block + (either attack1 and attack2) instead of just block + attack2
-Enemies will now roughly distance their strikes
-Weapon hitboxes are now stopped by the level borders, so they won't fly out of the level anymore
-The player will now always pick up the weapon at the closest X axis value
-Doubled intervals between machine gunner firing bursts
-More enemies spawn with gene modes in general
-Removed tutorial requirement to play arcade and story mode (I keep flip flopping on this)
Arcade mode specific change
-Added rarity tiers to all gene mods, and each rarity has a "weight" that determines how often it appears relative to others. Expect balance updates!
-example: rare (weight 10) is 5x more common than legendary (weight 2).
-Common: 100
-Uncommon: 40
-Rare: 20
-Epic: 10
-Legendary: 5
UI and visuals
-Added camera shake (can be turned off in the settings page)
-Added parry particle effect to more easily tell visually when a parry was hit
-Added foresight power "trail" behind the player which scales in length with foresight
-Weapon pickup text now stays above the closest weapon, which also indicates which weapon will be picked up
-Weapon pickup text now says what weapon to pick up
-Increased typing speed on most text elements
-Clickable buttons now expand when hovered and shrink back to normal when un-hovered
-Main menu logo now has an animation with the "future/present" theme
-Added character select swap animation
-Added rough sketch for character portrait while still locked
-Updated jump kick animation
-Updated multiple flavor texts
-Style select screen now shows each style's parry power stats
-Added outlines to cosmetics
-Made your "glow" on the map a lot more visually accurate to the actual meditation sensing range
-For gamepad: Replaced buggy virtual cursor with hopefully less buggy virtual cursor
-Made Story Mode UI prettier
Bugfixes
-Fixed controller moving head being stuck with head position
-Fixed controller move left/right getting stuck in one direction until you move the stick back to center
-Swapped controller attack1/attack2, since trigger is usually a bigger attack and shoulder is lighter (By default, shoulder punches and trigger kicks now).
-Controller no longer can select UI elements with traditional navigation, which in combination with the virtual cursor, led to a lot of misinputs
-Controller virtual cursor no longer can go off screen
-Fixed weapon outlines facing the wrong way while a fighter is facing left
-Fixed weapon outlines not having the right number of vertices
-Fixed tooltip position being off when screen size scaling is not set to 100% on windows (125% is commonly the default on laptops)
-Fixed player not being able to click the "add gene mod" button in sandbox mode
-Fixed denser adrenal glands buffing your attack speed at all times despite HP percentage
-Fixed denser adrenal glands not buffing your movement speed
-Fixed arcade mode bugging out after reaching the end of its reward tier by removing the feature (it was unused for a while anyway)
-Fixed some tutorial challenges having incorrect win screen text
-Fixed being able to drag the clarity indicator slider (it did not do anything anyway)
-Fixed challenges not having proper win text
-Fixed reverse hat description from ".tah si a sihT" to ".tah a si sihT"
Other
-Save data is now stored using json instead of using PlayerPrefs
-This means everyone's data will be reset, but to be fair, I did warn you in the Steam store page early access description >:)
-Music now fades more cleanly