This is easily the biggest update to the demo since we launched. It adds a whole new subsystem for building your little tile-powered engine: discarding for profit. We were looking for ways to encourage discarding tiles for a while and now we've finally found a good one: adding status tiles that sit in your hand until you find a way to remove them. And while they're sitting there (or when finally discarded) they have an active effect. For example they might heal you at the end of the turn.
In order to make the game more approachable we're also kicking off things by showing you the intro and then dropping you into the tutorial now. This only happens for new players.
Finally we've updated the look of the tiles to look more physical (to have more depth) and we've fixed a ton of small bugs.
New wildtiles:
Lullaby: Playing a Song hand weakens a random enemy.
Peel: Remove all opponent shields.
Recaw: Resurrect a random Phoenix tile.
Sleet: Shoo all frozen birds.
Breathe: Discard your hand. Get 1 strength per discarded tile.
Shed a Feather: Pick any hand tile to discard.
Chaosball (Fire): Randomise opposing tile order.
Demote (Fire): Push the first opposing tile to the back.
New persistent status tiles:
Echo: Draw 3 tiles when this tile is discarded.
Golden Echo: Draw 3 wildtiles when this tile is discarded.
Alarm: Awaken the boss when this tile is discarded.
Hot Potato: Receive 3 *burning* at end of turn.
Whistle: Draw an opponent when this tile is discarded.
Gremlin: Discard 3 tiles at end of turn.
Gesundhog: Heal 1 per tile in hand at end of turn.
Cone of Shame: Heal 3 at end of turn.
Die Münze: Fill hand when this tile is discarded.
Changes to existing tiles:
Olympic creates a Hot Potato now
Arson creates a Hot Potato now
Fan Club is now aromatic
Ear Worm creates an Alarm tile
Discarding tiles (e.g. Falling Upwards) made less rare in early levels
Other Gameplay Changes:
Increased probabilities of tiles that discard tiles
Added tiles that generate positive status tiles or enemies
Pump-A-Run modifier description updated to reflect addition of Snipe wildtile
Added vapour info to Steam Bath, Water Down, Water Landing, and Celsius
Attack sum now also visible while tiles are being played (hidden during enemy phase)
Hightail & Shoo tiles now animate the shooing of birds
Boss idle animation added
Tutorial now shown at the start for new players, with a tutorial button visible when the tutorial modifier is active
Flight 1 is now the entry point for all new players; the story intro has been removed from Flight 2
Music tracks replaced and new ones added, with correct credits
Bug Fixes & New Features:
Fixed transparency issue in the health box (new corner overlays)
Fixed tiles appearing too small in the loading blocker despite a low tile count
Fixed music stopping when exiting the stats menu
Fixed demo incorrectly labelling the start screen as "Flight 2" when it leads into Flight 1
Fixed Invincible Buff being removed after the first hit instead of persisting
Fixed shooing birds sometimes crashing the game
Fixed The Cuteness not updating the enemy attack preview value
Stats menu now has a title
Run name now displayed on the loading blocker
Loading blocker converted to its own scene, active while the game is loading/preparing
Bird cone lowered slightly to fit under the new top-left icons
Status tile backgrounds cleaned up
Many tile icons reworked
Game now starts in Steam language unless the user has manually overridden it (override is now saved as a config)
Various localisation fixes
Known issues
There are still issues when connectivity is bad (i.e. crash during run upload, Steam trouble)
I’ve half-added controllers support in the beta branch. Hope it doesn’t break anything.