Hey everyone!
We’ve been hard at work tracking down bugs, smoothing out the gameplay loop, and tweaking balance to make the ocean a little more chaotic (and a lot more polished). Today’s update brings a massive overhaul to the Bomb Shrimp, some major economy rebalancing, and highly requested quality-of-life features.
Here is a breakdown of what’s new in this patch:
🍤 The Bomb Shrimp Redesign & Creature Balance
The Bomb Shrimp was playing a little too safe, so we've swapped its Ability and Ultimate to make its kit feel way more explosive. To balance out its newfound offensive power, it’s going to be a bit more of a glass cannon.
Ability Swap: Its standard ability now spawns 2 spines that take and deal damage on hit (watch out, they can take damage from explosions too!).
Ultimate Swap: Its Ultimate now unleashes a devastating ring of 12 stabbing spikes directly around the shrimp.
Health Tuning: Bomb Shrimp health has been reduced by 25%.
Eel Buff: To keep things competitive, the Eel has received a massive 50% health increase to solidify its role as a sturdy threat.
💰 Economy & Repair Tweaks
We noticed starting setups were a bit restrictive, but cannons were becoming a dominant, cheap strategy. We’re shaking up the economy to give you more options early on while making late-game investments matter.
Starting Cash: Increased initial starting money to 300 to give you more freedom at the start of a run.
Cannon Rebalance: Cannon prices have been increased by x3. Make those placements count!
Repair Overhaul: Fixed a bug where repairing your ship/structures was always available. To compensate, the cost to repair has been significantly reduced to a scaling formula of $25 + (25 \\times \\text{Difficulty Level})$.
🛠️ Quality of Life & Features
Pause Menu: You can now properly pause the game using the Escape key.
UI-Less Mode: Added a toggleable clean UI mode perfect for recording cinematic gameplay or taking screenshots!
Barnacle Warnings: Added temporary warning indicators to Barnacles to give you a clear heads-up that they are about to explode.
🐛 Bug Fixes & Polish
We've squashed a ton of bugs that were messing with the UI, item management, and round transitions:
Fever Mode: Fixed bugs where Fever wouldn't end/reset on a round finish, and fixed an issue where Fever wasn't decaying properly.
UI & Inventory: Fixed a glitch allowing the Trinket and Equipment windows to be open simultaneously. Also fixed issues with replacing items and general "use item" bugs.
Visuals & Audio: Fixed a glitch causing shrimp to mysteriously disappear, cleaned up audio looping bugs, and added fresh new UI elements.
Physics & Building: Adjusted cannonball collisions for better consistency, and fixed a crash/bug that occurred when overbuilding on a green edge.
Thank you all for your continued feedback and support as we refine the game. Dive in, try out the new Bomb Shrimp, and let us know how the new balance feels in the comments or over on our community hub!
Good luck out there,
The Dev Team