Hello (o_o)/ it's me, here goes nothing.
Major Changes
New Fighter Weapons
Cluster (replaces bomb) - Fire a projectile that splits off into two smaller AoE explosives after a short delay.
Bomber - Summon a turret that fires AoE cluster bombs at nearby enemies.
Spiker - Fire orbiting spikes that grow in size each time they damage an enemy.
New Chemist Weapons
Piercer - Summon a turret that fires haywire projectiles which embed into enemies on contact, exploding after a delay.
Sliver - Fire orbiting shards that embed into enemies on contact, exploding after a delay.
New Vampire Weapons
Drain (Rework) - Drain can now sustain multiple projectiles, and each drain targets a different enemy.
Siphon - Summon a turret that drains the life from nearby enemies closest to it, Siphon is capable of multi-target.
Hex - Fire orbiting projectiles that curse enemies hit, causing an AoE explosion after a delay.
New Mage Weapons
Sphere (Rework) - Sphere now has intelligent functionality and fires targeted projectiles towards the nearest enemy, on top of applying persistent damage to enemies in contact with it.
Mirage - Spawn mirror images of mage which attract nearby enemies towards it, the mirror image explodes after a brief delay upon contact an enemy.
Drone (Rework) - Summon a turret that fires infinitely piercing arcs at nearby enemies.
Rune - Fire orbiting bombs that detonate on contact with nearby enemies, dealing AoE damage.
New Basic Weapons
Cannon - Fire a heavy basic projectile that has additional base pierce.
Repeater - Fire two rapid basic projectiles.
Bomb (Formerly Fighter's) - Fire an AoE projectile that detonates on contact with enemies.
Sentry - Summon a turret that shoots a volley of basic projectiles at the nearest enemy.
Belt - Fire orbiting projectiles that damage enemies and decay after a duration.
World Guardian Aphrodite (No Spoilers)
Aphrodite has been completed! This World Guardian is themed off Infatuation, and a new mechanic comes into play while fighting it.
Mastery Achievement: Do not come into contact with Aphrodite's Mist attack.
World Guardian Hermes (No Spoilers)
Hermes has been completed! This World Guardian is themed off the Japanese Samurai, telegraphed attacks, shuriken, and bamboo all await you!
Mastery Achievement: Do not take any damage from Hermes' Bouncing Shuriken.
World Guardian Apollo (No Spoilers)
Apollo has been completed! This World Guardian is themed off the.. Sun.. It's really freaking cool.
Mastery Achievement: Do not take any damage from Apollo's Solar Beams.
New Minimap
An In-Game Minimap has been added, allowing you to see past your screen's view, each interactive item has a different color icon, can you figure them out?
Fighter Ability Rework
Fighter's "Death Blossom" now spawns 16 cluster bombs on activation whose damage scales with player level, and gains 400% bonus attack speed over the duration of the ability. Death Blossom now only fires equipped weapons.
Chemist New Ability
Chemist's new ability, "Cataclysm" spawns four massive, progressively larger explosive rings, these rings will apply shards to any enemy hit and apply damage that scales with player level.
Chemist New Power
Chemist's new power, "Shatterstep" is a mobility power in which the player can queue a dash in a direction chosen by the cursor direction. On release of the power button, Chemist will spawn an explosion at the player's location before dashing towards the cursor. This explosion scales with the player's level.
Vampire New Ability
Vampire's new ability, "Blood Tithe" sacrifices progressively greater amounts of health to gain a significant damage bonus. Blood Tithe may be used multiple times in quick succession to gain stacking boosts, but the duration will not refresh on subsequent activation.
Vampire New Power
Vampire's new power, "Bat Form" is a mobility power in which the player morphs into a cluster of bats. While in Bat Form, you are impervious to damage and move incredibly fast.
Mage New Ability
Mage's new ability, "The World" manipulates the flow of time to freeze the world to a complete standstill. During this period, Mage moves and attacks significantly faster before having time snap back into the present.
Mage New Power
Mage's new power, "Warp" is a mobility power in which the player can queue a warp, revealing an indicator on where the player will reappear upon releasing the power button. Upon release, Mage will instantly blink to the new location.
Challenges Have Returned!
Eight new challenges have been introduced, which SIGNIFICANTLY improve the difficulty of Astrolite. Hell, I still haven't beaten it yet on ACE Mode.
Challenges: 1. Weak Towers: 50% effectiveness from towers 2. Weak Satellites: 50% XP from satellites 3. Hard Guardian: Guardians gain 10% more health and deal 50% more damage 4. Painful Bullets: Enemy bullets deal 50% more damage to you 5. Paired Elites: Elites always spawn in matching groups of two 6. Boulder Bullets: Boulders now spawn a bullet on death in your direction 7. Faster Scaling: Enemy Scaling occurs 50% faster 8. Longer CDs: Ability cooldowns are up 100%
Each challenge increases score earned by 25%, with an additional 100% score bonus if all eight challenges are enabled.
Special challenge and achievement: A.C.E. Mode (All Challenges Enabled)! A.C.E. Mode is enabled when all eight challenges are enabled. The first person to complete A.C.E. Mode with a valid recording will win $30 CAD.
Survival Mode
New Game Mode! Survival mode allows the player to play an endless version of Astrolite that has no World Guardians, and can be played near-indefinitely. Scaling does ramp differently than Conquest Mode, and will eventually become too difficult to survive. How long can you last?
XP Buff
Experience requirements have been significantly reduced past level 10, meaning more levels, more upgrades, more power!!!
Less-Major Changes
Weapons
Weapon Upgrade Update
Weapons have been tweaked in how upgrades are dished out, RARE and EPIC quality upgrades can BOTH contain +projectile upgrades, and EPIC upgrades may now contain +2 projectile upgrades.
As a result of this massive surge in +projectile choices throughout normal runs, damage will now be divided equally into each projectile, and damage scaling will be slightly reduced from baseline when you have more than 1 projectile. This is increased as you gain more projectiles.
Weapon Equipping
Reroll - 5 rerolls are given at the start of each game, and can be used to rotate through the weapon pool so that you may find the weapon you want.
Ban - Prevent the weapon selected from appearing in future weapon rolls.
Skip - Skip the weapon selection altogether, useful now that headhunters continue to drop weapon tokens even after you have 3/3 weapons equipped.
Weapon Swapping
If a weapon interface appears, and you have 3 / 3 weapons, you may now be presented with the option to swap out any of your weapons for new ones!
Weapon Shards
These shards spawn randomly in every planet, more densely packed near the outskirts of the playable zone.
Weapon shards allow the player to equip the weapon displayed within the shard, or replace a currently equipped weapon with the choice.
These shards can contain ANY weapon from ANY ship provided: 1. The ship has been unlocked. 2. The weapon has been unlocked.
Weapon Auto-Leveling
If replacing a weapon for another, the new weapon will be auto-levelled to your previous weapon's level minus one.
If selecting a weapon shard that contains a weapon you ALREADY have equipped, it will automatically level that weapon up by one.
When this occurs, a text pop-up will appear above the player briefly showing what stats the new weapon has.
Weapon Limiting
Weapons are now tied to their respective ships, and headhunter weapon tokens will not contain weapons from outside that pool.
Guardians
Guardian Death Improvement
Guardian's now have their limbs explode one by one during the death animation, with satisfying explosion SFX added and visual white streaks indicating an inevitable detonation.
Guardian Dialogue Tweak
Many lines of dialogue have been tweaked to hopefully be improved, reducing the awkwardness of some lines and an attempt has been made to paint slightly more lore through dialogue.
Guardian Particle Improvements
Guardians have had their post-fx particles improved, and should now feature more in-depth coloring to subtly improve visuals.
Difficulty Scaling During Guardian Fights
Game Scaling has been PAUSED during World Guardian fights, this is to ensure if your build does not specialize in single target situation that you are not punished further down the road for it.
Interfaces
Pause Menu Rework
The Pause Menu now has data abstracted away behind a Stats and Info button.
The menu now shows:
Current Enemies
Planet Modifiers
Challenges Enabled
Death Screen Rework
The death screen has been reworked, it now shows your loadout, any unlocks you have obtained THIS SESSION, personal bests for: Score, Kills, Damage, Level, Satellite Kills, Tower Activations, and Boss Kills.
The death screen also displays dynamic feedback depending on how you died, what you died to, or if you won!
Leaderboard Complete Overhaul
The leaderboard has had massive improvement done to it, and with some finnicky u8-buffer storing players can now see everybody's LOADOUTS displayed directly alongside their entry!
The leaderboard now has Score, Speed, and Kills. Kills replacing Deaths because.. deaths were dumb.
Ability HUD Rework
Abilities that have durations now appear on the right side of the player in a radial interface.
Player Crosshair Toggle
Players can now toggle the crosshair used to connect your ship with your cursor on and off .
Health Bar HUD Tweaks
The player's health bar now has dynamic coloring based on how close to death you are.
The health bar now has an additional bar below, that visually presents how close to regeneration you are.
Miscellaneous
Key Binds
Selecting the controls button in the menu now directly navigates you to the keybinding screen.
Tower Tweak
Towers baseline spawn amount is now 125, up from 100, on "Normal Tower" conditions.
Towers now have more condensed informational text when activated, and alert you to enemy waves.
EXP Tower no longer awards an EXP powerup, but instead increases permanent EXP gains by 15% for the rest of the match.
Upgrade Variance
Upgrades now have a larger range of values, increasing the variance to add more player decision making in the upgrade process.
Spray + Projectile Functionality
When gaining additional projectiles with Spray, the projectile bonus has a 3x application. +1 projectile will result in Spray shooting +3 additional projectiles.
Astrolite now has an Ending!
No spoilers!
Chemist Shard Explosions
Explosions now calculate the median size between ALL weapons that had applied the batch of shards in a given enemy, then explode based on that median.
Boss + Elite Visuals
Bosses now have a glowing purple star behind them to indicate their type more obviously.
Elites now have a glowing yellow star behind them to indicate their type more obviously.
The boss pointer has returned, and rotates around the outskirt of the screen to help signal the direction of faraway bosses.
Nuke Powerup Tweaks
Nuke now deals 9,999 damage (up from 1,000) to normal / special enemies. Bosses and Elites take a fixed 50% max hp instead.
Fixes
Memory Leak Fixes :)
Fixed a memory leak related to confetti never despawning, causing gradual performance issues as the match progressed.
Fixed a memory leak in the main menu related to the shadow entities that spawn when hovering the Play Button.
Interface Bug
Fixed an interface bug that caused Weapon Equip menus to NEVER despawn, locking the game once the player presses the pause button.
Performance
Upgrades and Weapon selects have been improved to feel more fluid, and have had changes to their cosmetic actions improving performance.
XP Orbs
XP Orbs now chase you properly on the beginning of Guardian encounters.
XP Orbs now behave correctly when a Magnet is active during the Guardian encounters.
XP Orbs now behave correctly when the Magnet Tower has been activated.
XP Orbs now chase the player from a farther distance during Guardian encounters.
XP Orbs no longer collide with one another, and are collected from a further distance local to the player to help improve performance.
Gilded Skins
Gilded Skins unlocks no longer appear multiple times despite having the achievement to unlock them already unlocked.
Bomb and Burst
Bomb and Burst, along with all other AoE weapons now detonate ON-CONTACT with enemies, and no longer phase through them if you have Pierce. Additionally, weapons have dynamic checks to prevent upgrades that do not benefit them from appearing. Ex. Drain will not have bullet speed upgrades as drain is instant.
Ganker and Bolters
Gankers and Bolters now behave more appropriately. Gankers once again actually shoot you, and Bolters are a hot mess but aren't harmful enough to warrant any real dev time.
Well THAT was a lot, wasn't it?
Some final remarks:
This is v0.99, and will require a substantial amount of playtesting and debugging to ensure v1.0 has a smooth bug-free release.
There is a $30 CAD bounty on the first person to complete (and record) an A.C.E. Challenge run. You may upload your run in the community discord: https://discord.gg/yfRmC8YnUe