Last week's update didn't happen, and that means - you guessed it - this week's is a BUMPER UPDATE :D We've been talking a lot about player accounts and enemy balancing, and the game loop. Well, as of today, it's all in and ready for you to smash apart!
PLAYER ACCOUNT & SYSTEMS!
This is huge. Lazarus now remembers not only what Ship and System loadout you had when you quit, but also if you swap Ships about it'll store their loadouts too. No more overwriting of Systems accidentally, no more swapping Ships and cheating with weird combos of Systems that aren't 'allowed', etc. This really improves the game a ton. You should only ever lose what you equipped when you die (see below).
PLAYER RESPAWNING.
You now get to choose where to respawn! We bring up the usual Death Screen, but now you see a map of the world and can choose where to spawn from the two closest player-controlled Xenotaphs to where you died. You're also shown the lcoation of your death, and the cost of respawning is described too - that you lose all your equipped Systems and any non-Banked loot. This is also accompanied by a little Tutorial from the Pug himself the first time you die.
FTUE.
We've implemented fixes across the tutorial that nail most of the issues we've seen. We know there's more to do, but right now every player should be able to complete the FTUE, and failing that, be able to skip it without any bugs spoiling things.
CHAT.
Hit 'enter' to focus key presses in the chat window. Nice and simple, if you want to keep typing after sending your current message you just have to hit enter twice.
MAP!
Now you can't hide it! You toggle between mini and fullscreen now. We'll introduce a proper 'minimise' button soon, we promise.
MELEE.
The Melee Enemy used to spam errors, now it does not. Affects performance, as well as the error log on the HUD.
CAPTURING XENOTAPHS.
We've balanced this nicely after playing it in the wild, so now capturing does not reset but rather pauses when interrupted (either by a defender wave spawning or just through bad luck). You're also able to see the capture progress bar at all times.
AI GENERALS & FLEETS.
There have been a ton of fixes & tweaks to how the AI Generals of each enemy faction behaves, and the result is that you should come across a lot more enemies, as they move through the world and try to capture territory much more aggressively. We're aware of some balancing we need to undertake, but right now the world of Lazarus is tons more exciting and dangerous!
TURRETS!
So we've balanced these, and rather than give you a total stock (for now, we'll see how this goes...) we simply prevent more than 8 turrets being spawned within a set radius. Turrets now also register to the Player faction, and they more reliably target stuff, with Drones being higher priority than Asteroids.
SHIP UNLOCKING
is now fixed, so you have to earn those extra Ships to play in rather than just having them unlocked from the start. Hopefully it makes the early game slightly less confusing for new players, who may've tried the Ship with 0 Core System Slots and died a few painful deaths as a result.
EQUIPPING
now allows you to back out of a decision, which is nice.
CODE REDEEMING
is back, so if you had a code, you can now redeem it. We know the game tells you it fails (working on a fix), but actually it gives you the skin just fine. So try it out!
VARIOUS
improvements to the FTUE, general text alignment and font fixes across the game.
Next week it's all about polishing up the FTUE to a MASSIVE sheen so that we can move on, and we're going to being bringing the Wipe back in to the game too. Not sure we'll have it ready to play with by next week, but you can be sure we'll be packing the update with more good stuff regardless!
Hit us up on the Discord to let us know what you think about this week's push, and what you'd like to see next!