Hey everyone,
I'm happy to announce the next major demo update v0.9.0 is now live on Itch.io and Steam for PC, Linux, Mac and Web (Itch.io only). A lot went into this one so my apologies that it took a while but hopefully I will be back to smaller, incremental patches from here on. As always, thanks to everyone who has played and given feedback so far - I’ve tried to implement as much of this as I can, with plenty still in the works so there’s more to come in the near future! Anyway, onto the changes:
v0.9.0 Patch Notes
New Feature - Ball Rituals: Each Ball now has it's own unique Ritual! In additional to the existing ones, these ball rituals play off the core mechanic for each ball. For the demo, this includes:
Cheater Ball Ritual: When triggered, all active bumpers take damage equal to your current total damage, multiplied by the number of Spare Balls you currently hold. This has a lower target mission count than other rituals, so it's also easier to trigger.
Flaming Ball Ritual: For 60s, all Bumpers hit explode shortly after, dealing 5x damage to all nearby bumpers and start to Burn (more on this later)
Banker Ball Ritual: For 60s, gain +1 Mana for each active Bumper hit
New Blessing:
Poisonous - all balls now deal damage over time to any bumpers hit.
New Ball: The Glyph Ball has been removed from the demo while I rebalance it, and has been replaced with:
The Banker - Gain +1 Mana per Bumper destroyed and 10% interest on all Mana held at the start of each new Act. This has the potential to be very powerful well when paired with Glyphs that boost damage based on currently held Mana.
New Glyph and Blessing Icons: Creating new icons for 100+ Glyphs and 24 Blessings took a while, but the first pass is now done. I've tried to pictorially represent what each glyph/blessing does so it's easier to read, however this wasn't always possible and required a fair bit of abstraction for some Glyphs. Generally I feel like they're looking much better now, and Glyph Infusions also now have new shaders so it's easier to pinpoint the Infused ones over regular ones ever from the main table screen.
Bonus Table Bumper: The central bumper on the Bonus Table now grants a free Blessing after being hit 5 times (max 1 per bonus Table activation). The visuals for this are still placeholder, as is the Bonus Table itself.
Poison and Burn effects: Complementing the new Blessing that grants a Poison effect, the Inferno Ritual and the Flaming ball now also Burn any targets hit, dealing damage over time.
New Glyphs: I've overhauled the selection of Glyphs in the Demo for better compatability with the 3 current ball choices. New Glyphs include increasing damage based on the number of spare balls you have, boosts to poison and burn damage and reducing the number of missions required to trigger certain rituals, to name but a few. Have a play to check out all the chagnes.
New in-game HUD: The in-game UI was overdue a polish and readability pass.
Balancing: Generally, I felt the game was ramping up way too quickly with a half-decent build, otherwise you were toast by Act III. I have massively increased the upper Act bumper HP with 6,666,666 now required to beat Act VI on Easy. I've also tweaked the lower Act HP and reworked some of the Glyph and Blessing values to hopefully help with the overall pacing. Ritual mission counts have also been changed to better reflect how powerful they are.
Popup Text: I've moved some, removed others. So, it turns out having giant letters cover the screen every time something happened was probably not a great idea. These are now limited to the start of each Act and have been moved towards the top of the screen to prevent taking up too much space. Rituals still have a slow-mo effect when triggered, but no longer throw enormous text in your face when they do.
Gravity pass: This is still a WIP, and I'll likely throw it all out and start again at some point but for now, the game physics has been tweaked to allow for easier ramp shots and slightly less chaotic bouncing around. I'm still not happy with it though, so this is definitely going to be improved in a future patch.
Graphical Settings: You can now set your screen sesolution and refresh rate, play in windowed mode and update your quality settings for optimal performance or visuals as you see fit.
Mac and Linux support (tentatively): These have been built but not widely tested, so please let me know any issues that will inevitably arise in these inital versions!
Bug fixes: I won't list them all, but some key fixes are
mid-run saving is now fixed so you can pick up where you left off
fixed a number of places the ball could get stuck
fixed a number of UI navigation issues with keyboard or controller
loads of text fixes, not just for spelling mistakes but also added clarity around some key functionality as well.
The Table and Ball Select screens are still horribly laid out and in need of a rework, I'll be working on those soon as well as the points balancing which is still all over the place - these are a priority for the next patch alongside the physics, and I also hope to rework Curses at some point soon too. The idea is these will replace the Blessings on the Act they are triggered, but players will have a choice between two, hopefully giving more ownership to each run. There's also a very slim chance that the shop opens just after the Blessings screen, locking the UI for controllers but I'll be looking into that asap, alongside a massive Audio/SFX overhaul. Just a heads up for what's still to come!
This was probably way to much to cram into one update, but a lot of these were quite tightly connected to it made sense to do it all together. Future demo updates will be smaller as I turn my attention back to the Beta and Release versions, both of which are in a much stronger place now due to these changes. Thank you all again for all the bug reports and feedback that helped shape this update!
Happy flipping!
Kenny