Here I am on the two year anniversary of putting B-12 in early access, reflecting on more than six years (off and on) working on a single project: A simple 3D action game to help me learn Unity. Obviously it's become more than that, and there have been a lot of ups and downs. A few weeks ago I was actually very close to abandoning the game... But it turns out that a long break was good for me. And truly facing the idea of admitting failure brought a sense of motivation I did not expect. With this update I can finally say that B-12 is playable from start to finish. And thankfully, I can finally say that I like the game again. For a while that wasn't true.

A couple of very important notes:

I've decided to scale back to the main features as they were originally planned in my head. Twelve robots. Twelve levels. For now, I am going to refrain from adding alternate game modes or secret levels, etc. I am however still planning to add some lore in the form of collectibles (you'll see!), as well as a neat ending cutscene that will give you a brief glimpse into the wider world where this fictional robot simulator exists. If the game does better than expected coming out of Early Access later this year, I will very happily keep adding content to the game afterwards!!

Another note about the music. This was a really difficult decision, but I decided that it was important for me to make all of the music myself. That was also part of the original plan, but I thought having someone else work on it would increase my productivity and decrease the amount of time it would take to finish. Instead, it actually pulled a little bit of my motivation away. After all, this was supposed to be about creating something entirely myself to see what I could accomplish. I am extremely grateful to Delogated for working with me and letting me use some of his tracks early on in development, but ultimately doing the music myself made me feel a lot more motivated to finish the game.

Anyway, on to the change-log! What a huge update!
*The first item is VERY important.

-----0.1.0-------------------------------
-Removed automatic ledge-hop and replaced it with wall-cling and a more versatile wall-jump (a la Mega Man X, Meatboy etc.) Feels much better!
-Added the final robots: B-10, B-11 with corresponding weapons (plasma-sabre still WIP), along with AI/boss version of B-12
-Added the final levels (4-1, 4-2, 4-3, and 4-4 (final boss arena))
-Added dash and wall-jump to AI for B-10, B-11, and B-12 (final boss)
-Many other improvements and new features added to AI code.
-All weapons are now 'unlocked' in the kiosk/store. Normal prices instead of them being 999 until you defeat that enemy-type. (More fun this way.)
-Crates will now drop weapons sometimes. (Again, more fun this way.)
-Made it so that weapon/etc energy is always recharging when not in use, rather than having to hold down primary attack all the time. I think I like it better this way.
-Udpdated engine to Unity 2017.4 (LTS)
-Replaced SSAO and old camera effects with new Unity Post Processing Stack.
-Nerfed wall-cling when touching ice.
-Increased jetpack energy depletion rate. (It was way OP before...)
-Aim-assist no longer targets crates.
-Changed camera-fade and level-gen screen colors.
-Fixed camera-fade not finishing before the next scene/level loads.
-Removed option for vsync and implemented adaptive vsync. This is to remove some headache from the user experience on very high end or low end systems.
-Minor changes throughout many of the levels.
-Fixed help screen getting cut off at non-16x9 aspect ratios.
-Adjustments to volume of a few sound effects. Still working on the final audio mix.
-New combat and boss music, some tweaks to dynamic music code (still tuning)