After releasing Devader I felt a bit lost, I got a lot of support from friends but only very few streamers picked it up. I am very grateful for the ones that did! Watching the streams/videos gave me a lot of new insights about how the game is played and where people struggle. I still have a few of these issues to address. It feels like I need to add more tutorials, namely for nuke targeting (gamepad), turret handling and bullet grazing. But I hate destroying the flow with more clutter.
To get out of the lost state, I just decided to dive back in and improve wherever I could. So a lot has happened in the last 2.5 weeks, also thanks to some very helpful people on my Discord.
What you will first notice is the front page now has a whole bunch of blacked out icons. I became aware that nearly no one understood that Devader offers a huge variety of different paths leading to different play-styles and different Bosses. The game is very deterministic, so if you always do the same thing, you will get the same results. The icons represent beating the game depending on the difficulty, winning with different game endings and surviving using one of the skill choices. The badges are color graded. You get a green badge for beating Easy. All the other badges require you to play on Normal or higher. Bronze is for Normal, Silver for Hard and Gold is awarded to Deity wins.
I've been working hard on making Deity more viable. Deity used to be something I just added for fun. I did not really expect people to play on Deity, but boy was I wrong. So now Deity has received quite the make-over. Impossible bosses have been tweaked to be extremely hard, but most have some kind of trick/weak spot for the determined player to discover. This is also true for most bosses in the game anyway, but Deity bosses will pretty much require you to find a solution.
The Blinker turret was deemed much less useful than the Warden. Interestingly enough, it used to be the other way around, but at that time most people were playing on lower difficulties. With larger amounts of foes & bullets, the more flexible Warden becomes a lot more attractive. The very static Blinker tends to be taken out by the hordes. To counter this imbalance, the Blinker has been given a new defensive mode. The defensive mode works like the recall ability of the Warden and can be switched at any time (switching affects all Blinkers). While in "Hedgehog" mode Blinkers can not attack, but will only take 10% of the normal damage. This can make them useful to distract enemies, or simply to hide behind.
Healing balls are attracted to friendly units, they could even be too strong now.
The Ammo upgrade was pretty unimpressive, due to some changes I made shortly before release. It has received a buff, that is tied to bullet grazing. Instead of just firing 2 shots the graze cannon now fires 2+(Ammo-Level) shots, making it way stronger.
Skills have seen a lot of changes. I have to admit that I did not do myself a favor by adding the skills only a month before release. The balance was completely off and I do hope that the new changes will be appreciated and make the skills more even and interesting. Additionally, every skill now adds a twist to the bullet grazing mechanic. The one you can see here extends grazing to any other nearby shot and works best on slow moving dense fields.
The Skills now use the complementary color of your Devader to make them visually more distinct. This can be changed in the options under Accessibility along with a bunch of other new settings.
One streamer rightly complained about the sound effects being bad and while watching his video I could only agree. For some reason it was fine on my system. Yesterday I finally managed to reproduce the problem he was experiencing. By strongly reducing the volume a lot of sounds ended up not getting played. This should not happen and I managed to fix the problem by composing all the sound effects first before reducing the volume. It was a big change and I hope it won't have any negative impacts I am not aware of.
High-Scores: Have been an astonishingly painful experience. I think the new build should resolve the issues with crazy high scores as I've changed the score verification process on the server. The Steam high-score list is still messed up, but I will be resetting those scores and uploading the corrected ones in a few days. That is the plan at least.
I've made so many changes in the last 3 weeks, I have likely forgotten some pretty significant ones. This was all just off the top of my head...
If you have any issue, please report them. I want to make Devader as good as I can. I know now I should have released into Early Access first, but I don't think that can be changed. So I am just going to plod on and do what I can. Don't like something, tell me!