Even Starblazers need to relax every now and then, which is why we bring you the world of Blossom.
Blossum is a beautiful, tranquil world and has our largest competitive map yet! Originally we were going to save this for the campaign, but after fans saw the development on Twitch, we decided to release it to them early. It has a large, U-shaped playing field, but can easily be navigated using two lightning fast hyperlanes that wrap around the map. Will you race around the outer edge of the map on a hyperlanes? Or perhaps you'll sneak underneath the tunnel hidden by the complex? Or maybe you won't attack the enemy head-on at all and choose to hide in the far back corner of the plains behind the hyperlanes. All decisions are up to you as the space commander!
For our Oculus users, a much requested feature was the ability to snap turn. Now, whenever player taps the toggle button left or right on the Oculus or WMR, the camera will turn 30 degrees. I must admit, this certainly has made managing battles a lot easier! Additionally, to support our new Oculus and WMR users, I changed the console in the Demo Room to show controls for all three headsets. Before, it had the HTC Vive as a placeholder (oops, Amateur Hour! Haha). Now, when you walk up to the console, it cycles through all of the controls virtually on the controller. A clearer way to show off controls no matter which headset you prefer.
One of the biggest sets of bug fixes was around the bugginess of the Medic units. We used to have issue with:
• Medic healing effects still being shown on invisible ships (that sucks, right? No more sneak attacks if that happens)
• Medic healing effects still being shown on paired units even after the Medic has died. Even though the Medic wasn't still healing, this is definitely misleading!
Gameplay Tweaks:
• Medic healing reduced by 10% to a per unit healing rate.
• Sniper health decreased from 100 to 75, decreased damage by 20%.
• Hyperlane symbols added to Icarus, using the design from Blossom for consistency.
• The Quit button will now automatically pull up after a match to make it obvious to the player how to quit the round.
• One nerf to Easy mode - Spectres will now never spawn when difficulty if set on Easy. As much as we love our Spectres… newcomers need to ease into their awesomeness!
• Locks now say "Coming Soon" instead of just locked. That's more accurate… as we're working as fast as possible to deliver these features! They won't be locked forever :)
• Training Room is more epic now… more ships, added music and fanfare.
Bug Fixes:
• In some cases in which a Flagship would remain invisible after a Spectre has died. Now it'll consistently reappear.
• Fixed some instances of UI Sprite layering overlapping in the wrong order.
• Player could accidentally spawn outside of the arena in Incomplex.
• Spectres and all invisible ships were still being shown on the player's handheld map (yeah, that's definitely not fair, right!?)
• If the user exited back to the Start Screen AFTER they've been to Lobby, grabbing of the ships was disabled permanently.
Finally, a lot of coding went into prepping the Campaign. The only results you can see on this now is the addition of the Campaign button in the Lobby menu. Right now it's locked until finished up. Get ready for this in one of the coming patch releases!
P.S. there's the beginnings of a pretty epic Easter egg in the Start Screen. Kudos to the first player to find and post on social media!