The time has come! v1.0 is here!

Without further adieu, let's get into it!

Big Ticket Changes:

Gilding!

Gilding a weapon is achieved when the weapon reaches max level (12) - it presents the player with 3 extremely powerful upgrades for the weapon and causes the newly gilded weapon to be LOCKED IN, preventing it from being swapped out.

Ricochet + 100% Bullet Speed

Bullets can bounce off the edge of the screen back into enemies, meaning more opportunity for damage!

Splash + 50% Bullet Size

Bullets that hit an enemy leave a size-dependent AoE attack that both hits the same enemy again, AND nearby enemies for a percentage of the damage.

Raw +2 Projectile

Gain +2 bullets for the weapon that DO NOT incur a damage penalty. (Typically +1 projectile upgrades split the damage between the new projectile, resulting in reduced damage PER projectile but more damage overall)

Additionally... Gilded Weapons roll ALL-Weapon bonuses on level-up post-gilding, and Gilded Passives roll ship bonuses on level-up post-gilding!

Tutorial Rework!

The tutorial now covers important information to the core loop of Astrolite. While it doesn't cover everything like Satellites, Towers, and Star Power, it does a good enough job to explain the essential concepts you need to beat the game.

New Ships!

Speedster - Conquer a planet in <= 30 minutes

Operator - Equip 3 unique summon weapons at once

Daredevil - Fully upgrade two different weapons in one run

Luna - Kill a World Guardian in 10 seconds or less

Enigma - Activate 35 towers in a single run

New Weapons!

Spread - Unlocked with Speedster

Gatling - Unlocked with Operator

Decay - Unlocked with Daredevil

Globe - Unlocked with Luna

Card - Unlocked with Enigma

New Passives!

+Critical Strike Damage - Achieve a 4x multi-crit or higher

+Pierce - Score >5,000,000 in a single run

+Projectile - Conquer the Sun with 5 or more challenges active

+Shield - Die before the first World Guardian even spawns

+Absorption - Take 3 separate instances of damage from Zeus' spears

+Cooldown Reduction - Defeat a World Guardian with >= 2 tower challenge

New Sound Effects!

Green Weapons

Green weapons now have a punchy explosive bullet sound, much heavier than the previous bullet sound effect that now applies only to Basic weapons.

Orange Weapons

Orange weapons now have a crystalline shard sound, similar to a bunch of glass needles being thrown.

Blue Weapons

Blue weapons have a splotchy goop sound. The intent was to sound similar to meat / flesh.

Purple Weapons

Purple weapons have a synthetic hum to sound futuristic, or magical.

Fighter Ability

Death Blossom has had SFX added to sound much more explosive, including a whirring riser SFX for the duration of the ability.

Chemist Ability

Cataclysm has significant explosive SFX added that grow in pitch as they tremors increase.

Vampire Ability

Blood Tithe has a high pitch activation, alongside a damaging SFX applied.

Mage Ability

The World has had a deep bass boosted SFX added to accompany the clock sound. The intent is to emphasize the world suddenly snapping to a standstill.

Weapon Unlocking!

Unlocking weapons now follow progress through in-game thresholds, unique for each color-code type.

Green, Orange, Blue, Purple thresholds:

• 2,000 Enemy Kills

• 10 Mini-Boss Kills

• 200 Satellite Kills

• 15 Planets Conquered

Added Visuals!

Nebula Backgrounds

There are two different visual variants of nebulae added that will appear scattered throughout the planets, they are less frequent than star fields.

Living Backgrounds

Enemies from distant stars now appear in the background, moving around as they would in game. They are purely cosmetic.

World Guardian Changes!

Poseidon Rework

Poseidon has had a visual uplift and changes done to its water attack, no longer curving in motion and being replaced by straight flying water blades. The trident attack has been inverted, encouraging players to remain calm and stand still during its barrage.

Ouranos Rework

Ouranos now has a visual uplift, and a new enrage phase. During the enrage, Ouranos' orbs permanently go to the side of the player, one higher one lower, and shoot slow moving bullets completely horizontally. This makes the homing feathers much more challenging to dodge without conscious decision making.

Kronos Rework

Kronos now has a visual uplift, and a new mechanic when its time crystals get destroyed. Kronos rewinds time back to the very start of the fight, saying "AGAIN!" almost as if nothing has changed. (It sometimes jumpscares me LOL)

Zeus Improvement

Zeus has had a visual improvement, alongside new indicator lines for its lightning blitz attack!

Apollo Improvement

Apollo has been tweaked to no longer deal damage SO quickly when being hit. Its fire wall now deals projectile type damage (10) and at a much slower rate. The beam attack now deals damage with the same immunity frames being granted as bullets.

UX Improvements!

Overheating

Running your power bar empty will overheat, this now shows a visual text prompt and a SFX to really emphasize why your power no longer works.

Interfaces

Interface menus may now be closed by hitting Escape on your keyboard, this works both in and out of game!

Passive Interfaces now has a REROLL and SKIP option independent of the Weapon Interface. Get a bad passive roll? Reroll it! (3) per run MAX

The mini-map now has a green edge and backdrop to it, helping players more easily visualize the contents and have it stand out for new players.

Play Room

Play room has had a massive redesign, now showcasing a Ships, Weapons, and Passives button that can display the actual content in Astrolite!

Ships showcases and equips all the different types of choices you have in Astrolite, including important information to read up on if you choose. You can also get a feel for each ship with interactive buttons like Ability, Weapon, and Power that can display even MORE information!

Weapons showcases all the unique weapons in Astrolite, including how they work and what is required to unlock them!

Passives shows all the information you'll need about what passives do, how to unlock them, and what build they work best with! You can start to build craft before your runs!

Pause Menu

The pause menu has had much of its information abstracted behind the Stats and Info button, so as to not overwhelm newer players.

Death Screen

The death screen has had a visual facelift, now showing tips dependent on how YOU died in the run. There is also an unlock-box in the bottom left that keeps track of your session's unlocks.

Leaderboards

Leaderboard have had a massive improvement, both visually and interactively. There is now a challenges segment, that keeps track of how many active challenges you had in your run (it all says 0 because the data storage cannot work retroactively lol)

Other Changes:

Buffs :)

Leech

Leech has had a large improvement, no longer following the cursor and instead becoming a 5 projectile spread-out weapon.

This should follow more in-line with Vampire's sustaining passive, allowing more opportunity to heal with its base weapon, and it just feels way better too.

Chemist

Chemist's Shatterstep now works in the universally intuitive way that it dashes in the direction your SHIP is facing, and not your cursor. Finally you can kite and attack enemies at the same time. This change is especially noticeable for controller players.

Weapon Banning

Banning weapons no longer ends the interface, it instead just deletes the weapon banned and continues on. This can be useful for banning 2x weapons you dislike, then rerolling with much better odds of seeing weapons you DO like.

Nerfs :(

Vampire's Bat Form

This is a oof. Bat Form now drains 33% faster to prevent players from relying on it entirely when in sticky situations. Positioning should always be the best approach.

Power Recharge

Power recharging has been HEAVILY nerfed when fully exhausted (-50%) - This should act as a clear punishment for riding your power too hard, and hopefully will result in damage being taken.

Weapon Level Cap has been increased to [12]

Normally this would be a buff, but since the Gilding mechanic is so powerful, delaying the gilding bonus by 4 additional level-ups technically is a loss of DPS until later on. Additionally, the gilding mechanic being activated at level 12 means you need to be LEVEL 72 to fully gild all 3 of your weapons. Very unlikely.

Time-Up Towers

Planets now have a hard cap of 5:00 total. When activating Time-Up Towers, they will check if the running total of the world will be below or above 5:00, if above 5:00, all Time-Up Towers on the planet will despawn. This is to keep the game going on, as players typically end up scaling the enemies to an absurd degree and die before reaching the end of the conquest. Survival exists for those who don't want to play the typical game loop.

Controller Improvements!

Massive UX Improvements

Controllers now have consistent functionality across all menus and in-game.

(B) now returns to prior screens, or closes out of interfaces, or unpauses the game.

The D-Pad now is used on many screens and menus to select options.

Leaderboard that Listens

Leaderboards are now scrollable with the Right Stick

Bug Fixes!

Controller Out-of-Focus

Fixed a weird controller bug when your game was not in focus that would cause the game to rapidly pause the moment you unpaused it, and would not resolve until you clicked onto the game screen with your mouse.

Boss Spawning

Fixed a bug that caused bosses to spawn out of bounds if you were hugging the border of the playable area, bosses now always spawn directed towards the center of the game room.

Options UI Text

Fixed a bug that caused the Options Button text to pop-in appearing larger for a brief moment before shrinking to its normal size.

Needle Spasm

Fixed a bug related to Needle Pierce that caused the bullets to swirl around an enemy rapidly, doing essentially nothing, This was because Needle was previously coded to ALWAYS chase it's target, but with how pierce functions, once an enemy is hit with a bullet that still has pierce values, it cannot be hit again.

Death Blossom Controller

Death Blossom no longer locks your controller cursor in the location it was prior to activating the ability, instead the cursor just hides on the player for the duration of the ability.

Ship Cheese

Ships can no longer be spam selected with a Controller to play a run with ships you do not yet have unlocked. This interface was both fixed and then abstracted away into the Ships UI interface.

Operator Unlock

Operator had a bug where unlocking Daredevil would accidentally unlock Operator as well, this has been fixed.

Audio Priority and Audio Channels

Audio priority has been tweaked to put specific bullets far back in audio priority to prevent them from killing any other audio sources. (like music) Audio channels have been increased from 128 to 256 to allow more audio to occur when intense late game situations are occurring. (Namely multiple rapid fire powerups alongside a fully charged Death Blossom)

Guardian HP

Fixed a bug in which Guardian's HP was inadvertently doubled due to a code mistake. This has been fixed. (I still beat A.C.E. with this bug in the game so BOOYAH)

Ability and Power Icons in the Pause Menu

These icons have been swapped to match the Play Room, this was unintended and was flipped.

Death Screen Empty Unlock Text

The death screen empty unlock text now can be selected multiple times and will display new text each time, the text will not loop onto the same text when clicking.

Power Capacity Drainage

Fixed a bug that caused power consumption to drop below 0, this was more obviously tested on Chemist and Mage's powers, causing extremely slow recharging. Now these powers can only drain to 0.

Misc.

Weapon Shards and Tokens (Gilded)

Weapon shards and weapon tokens no longer spawn when all 3 of your weapons have become gilded, as gilded weapons are irreplaceable, there is no purpose to interact with new weapon any longer.

Passive Interfaces

Passives and more importantly Weapon Improvement upgrades now show more information regarding the rarity of the upgrade, Rare and Epic weapon improvements now have text pop up at you to grab your attention that this upgrade is "BETTER!"

Passive/Weapon Hover Improvements

Previously, when getting a weapon that had bonuses in ALL stats including a gilded benefit, the tooltip would sometimes overlap with the title, this has been fixed.

Power-Up Visuals

Power-Ups now have a green border around them, the green should help catch the eye when playing and guide newer players towards them.

Challenges

Challenges are content-locked behind beating Kronos. You really should not be dabbling into challenges until you can comfortably beat Kronos anyways.

Survival Mode

Survival is now content-locked behind beating Hermes. Survival should be a reward for nearly completing Conquest, giving you an opportunity to relax and mess around with your unlocks.

Unrelated!

This is for the readers ;)

During the tutorial I set player's XP to -6,000 to not spam them with levels during a particular segment, LOL! Suckers, and they won't even know! Mwahaha

Guardian Cry

Guardians now pre-emptively cry when 00:15 seconds remain, followed up a screenshake to really signify the beginning of the Guardian fight.

Tutorial Quirk

You are no longer able to kill yourself during the tutorial. You either win, or quit.

Tower Text

Activating towers now has the tower effect text pinned to the top of the screen for a set duration.

Pause / Upgrade / Equip Expanded Stats

Stats in these screen now FINALLY show true and accurate data about the player. This includes the new Shield, Absorption, Cooldown Reduction, and Level Flat Damage as well!

This is it, the big v1.0

Thanks to everybody involved in iterating the development of Astrolite looking for the fun.

Shoutouts:

Matt <3 World Guardians and so much of the fun content in the game would have never been a thing without you

Ethan <3 Even though you don't like this genre of game, you played the hell out of it in its prototyping stages, lots of fun was had, and without you knocking some sense into me this game may never have been finished.

Toni <3 So much of Astrolite was improved from your months and months of interest with the game. Near Miss wouldn't be a thing, and neither would the Bounce Ring on level ups. Not to mention keeping me in line when it came to cohesive menu aesthetics. Hope you're doing better.

The Discord Community <3 You've helped catch and fix HUNDREDS of bugs, and helped bring the game together more and more for visual cohesiveness and game feel. Every discussion we got into was a ton of fun and kept me going.

The Gamemaker Discord <3 Literally a whole year went by with me asking tons, and TONS of coding questions within the discord. Learning bit by bit and getting so much help. Cecil, Mimpy, Jon Peterson, Judacraz, Gleb, and more. Thank you.

WePlaytestGames <3 Great unbiased feedback from someone not already interested or engaged with Astrolite, the playtests have improved game feel and intuitive design so much!

GMMatharoo <3 Thanks to your Gamemaker Tutorials I was able to get started into game development, without you I genuinely would never have begun.

My NAIT Homies <3 Your kind words and early-in-development playtesting was a lot of fun, Shoutout to Diarmud and Russel especially, thanks guys :D

And more <3 There have been many more people involved in helping me out, testing things, giving suggestions and feedback. Thank you!