Skyfear's August update brings a ton of fixes and changes to accommodate the new-player experience. The #1 priority after this update is getting bots into multiplayer.
But for now, the highlights include:
Spores & Lairworld
- Earned Spores will now appear in the post game menu as icons
- Icons will now appear over Spores in the Lairworld, providing more context from far away
- Improved visual effects and readability of Spores and the egg element
- Added a Welcome Screen that explains Spores to new players
- 1 Spore will now be given to you upon starting a new save, so that the Lairworld has a working example for new players immediately
- Fixed an issue where Spore claim UI would dissapear if you didn't have enough Material but tried to claim it
- Added trees to spore vegetation spawns
- Spore vegetation now has more wind animation and color
- Spore vegetation spawn radius and population adjusted
- Lairworld spawns have all been moved towards the center cave area
- New players will now start with 2000 Material and a bit of starting XP, making their first battle or two a lot more lucrative and more likely to start seeing spores early.
- Spores will now be colored a bright silver if the spore contains a cosmetic, and brown/bronze if contains a title or emblem. This will be reflected on the Icon as well. This should allow players to make more informed decisions when traveling to new spores.
I'd seen a ton of data suggesting that the purpose of the Spores x Lairworld just wasn't clear enough without explaination, I am hoping that these new things help connect the dots better.
Quality / Improvements
- Nametag fixes and behavior improvements; in most cases behavior should be improved, but I am aware of a few new (revived?) bugs
- Removed more leftover debug prints.
- Changed speed where firing bolts is prevented to 3005, up from 3000, to attempt to handle rare cases where speed vector is fluctuating.
- Added magic, perks, and ability unlock %s to career stats
- Fixed a few stats related issues
- Added more information regarding unlocks, loadouts, and spores in the Help menu
- Brought back music during battle
- Added more music tracks
- Battle intro music moved to play on Countdown, instead of first time you spawn in. Less overstimulating
- Removed multiplayer menu forcing a particular soundtrack to play; will now just continue playing whatever was playing
- Adjusted a lot of default settings, including music volume, camera position, camera shake & tilt (set to 50%)
- Lowered default AI difficulty
- Material pickups will now float towards you when you get near, making pickups both less clumsy and more satisfying
- Fixed an issue where audio mix defaults used by the reset button in Options was not equal to the actual defaults
- Adjusted unlocks delivery data, made some of the newer scales more rare
- Adjusted default friendly and enemy team color options to be the most visually distinct of the available options
- Letting go of zoom while sprinting now returns your FOV to the sprint FOV, running around during combat now feels much better
- Added Leaderboards to the Post Game menu
Features
- You can now switch teams during battle, so you can manually re-balance teams if they need to
- Added spectator; you can now cycle through players or freecam, and play with the camera during battle
Changes to Updates
After delivering monthly updates since March of this year, I've come to the conclusion that
scheduled monthly updates may not be ideal for my development style, being a solo developer. I've decided to slow down, avoid crunch, and prioritize quality over quanity.
Currently I'm putting all attention on getting bots in multiplayer, because that's a significant factor in the game's long term heartbeat. But everything else on the roadmap is also on my mind. I also want to update the official website and get more marketing material put together. I will still be issuing patches or small updates to address bugs and immediate issues, but for the time being, the monthly cadence is being subsided. It was a good thing to try, it can be monthly again at some point, but right now I want to make sure I'm doing solid work and not rushing.
Thank you for your patience, support, and thank you for playing <3
- developer, telekrex