Content/Balancing
NEW LEVEL: Volcano (6-S and 6-E).
NEW POWERUP: In Killing Memory. Unlocked by beating 4-S
EXPLOSIVE SHIELD REWORK: The explosion isn’t as big anymore, but the shield now gets ejected upon taking a hit. This ejected shield will continuously explode until the powerup duration ends, and the player can either Punch it around or use Bounce to carry it with them.
PROGRESSION REWORK: 1-S and 2-S are unlocked from the start, but both of those need to be beaten to unlock 3-S. Beating 3-S unlocks both 4-S and 5-S, and both of those need to be beaten to unlock 6-S.
DEMO OUT VERY SOON: It says it'll be released midnight, but don't kill me if it doesn't come out at that time. It's in Steam's hands now.
FREE PLAY COMPLETE. Every T1 can have their spawns set, every T2 can be directly spawned, and there's a small list of actions you can enable like healing, godmode, or powerups. You do not have to see an enemy to be able to spawn them in Practice Mode (this is so that demo players can check out every enemy), but you do need to have the powerup unlocked to use it.
The Tutorial now includes a Boxer and The Dummy, and some of the Tutorial text has been improved.
New Bestiary logs have been added and now almost every enemy has at least one log. More Advice has been added too.
Mutation rates have been reduced for: Assassin, Chariot.
Spawns have been modified for: Beach, Forest
Enemies that are actively mutating can now be killed by the player.
Gigabrite's Phase 2 has been changed to something less stupid. Additionally, he will now teleport to the player if they get too far from him during his Presence Stance.
The waves generated by Knife Overcharge now deal 1 damage. Perhaps I was looking at range too much and forgetting that each wave doing 2 damage is a little absurd. It's still very powerful after this.
SPRITE REWORK: Sprites now move slower, and take much longer to fire, but their projectile initially travels much faster. When mulling over some pain points of Forest's design, I realized that Sprites might actually be the problem. They operated in the same threat range as Rogues while not having as clear of an indicator, and you'd often get randomly hit by point-blank bullets. This adjustment makes them more committal snipers.
Rogue's lunge now takes 0.05s longer to come out. All that being said, here's a small test.
Sporer now places half as much terrain with its attack. It was contributing to visual clutter without doing much else.
Javelineer now has a special interaction when Bounced on.
Sweeper now has a follow-up attack after its blinding explosion.
Zips now have 1 health instead of 2.
Spinners and Blenders now pause for 0.10s longer after taking damage.
Punching a Blender now sends it flying, giving kill credit for any enemy killed in the process.
Bruiser’s attacks take longer to come out, but it now has a backsway and a new attack.
Various enemies have had their received knockback modified. A notable example is Guard taking much less knockback so that the player doesn't have to chase after a Guardbreak.
Visual/Audio
Every level has received some form of lighting logic in a similar fashion to Cave and Volcano. It is very subtle on the brighter levels.
Various enemies and projectiles have received improved lighting compatibility.
Various enemies have received special distinguishing visual effects on specific levels to help with visibility.
Various enemies have gotten visual improvements in the form of sprite fixes, new animations, new sounds, and/or new indicators: Scrambler, Sweeper, Toxxer, Warlock, Zip
Various bosses have also gotten the improvements: Gigabrite, Nightmare Growth, Stonespark
Combo hits for non-T1 enemies have received a massive overhaul to improve feedback. You should now know better if you just hit a good combo on a T2 or rock.
Warning indicators (any projectile shooting ones, for example) have been adjusted to fade away at a rate depending on their duration. This should make them all feel more distinguishable (beforehand they were all fading at the same rate).
Powerup drops now have a small intro animation + sound.
Several touch-ups to moveset visuals and hitstop have been done.
Cancel Dash has been renamed to Brake. This is to avoid confusion with Dash-cancelling Slashes.
Modified text drop shadow code so that it should work in some cases where it wasn't. However, this might randomly break something, so keep me posted.
Various UI elements have gotten visual improvements: Mutation Indicator, Anomaly Detected text, Unlock Boss Skip text, I forgot the rest
There is now a flashy finisher effect for when you kill a boss.
There is now a notification to inform the player that Boss Skip is available. There is also now a notification whenever the player unlocks something.
Added an epilepsy warning.
Sporers have been visually adjusted so that they look different enough from Sprites.
Bugfixes
Optimized MOST enemy behavior when the player is dead.
Fixed some enemies having improper drop tables.
Fixed not being able to consistently Clean Hit a Scrambler.
Fixed some enemies not being damaged by things that they should.
Fixed Boxers being unable to merge into Bruisers.
Fixed a bug where Plasms were doing contact damage.
Fixed a catastrophic bug where the player would receive status effects at a much bigger range than their hitbox said.
Fixed THE bulldozer bug.
There's a lot of other bugs I probably forgot.