Hello fighters!
Thanks to your feedbacks the update 1.05 is now live.
This update is mainly about difficulty balancement and savegames, but also other things listed below.
1. Difficulty
You face many types of opponents in Carsteroids, but they can mainly be categorized in primary and secondary. Primary opponents spawn once at the start of a game (they're your main target) and secondary opponents spawn at some intervals during a play. Before this update a game could have been infinite because the continous spawning of secondary opponents. After this update when you beat a primary opponent no more secondary opponent will enter the combat (now a secondary target enters the arena only if the primary target is still in play).
This change brought a significative alteration to the "ecosystem" of Carsteroids because with less secondary opponents less points are generated and consequentially the player might earn less money for the upgrades. So it took a while to rebalance all the factors for a good compromise between all of them. Hopefully the gameplay will be better balanced now.
2. Saving
Because the game automatically saves at certain points to preserve the unlocks and the overall progress, when I added the possibility to manually save, the load of a checkpoint started to mess all of this. Now with this upgrade when starting a new game (independently if it's arcade, story or versus) the game always overwrites the previous data deleting also the story mode saved checkpoint. This is the best option to keep all the data for a game born on roguelite foundations and featuring 3 different main modes connected between each other.
3. More...
Lastly, some improvements to the reload notifications and some AI upgrades to give to your opponent a little more of unpredictability. Below you can find the complete changelog. Game on!
v1.05 changelog:
- Added "reload" voice on zero shots (normal difficulty).
- Added "reloading" sound on button pressed.
- Remaining shots' HUD info now counts downward.
- Now the game automatically records a leaderboard score on "quick restart".
- Reduced screen-shake magnitude from stage 6 onwards.
- Added a new save checkpoint on stage 15.
- Upgraded boss' hit points for stage 10 and stage 15.
- Opponents' combat AI updated.
- No more secondary opponent is spawned after you beat the primary target.
- Rotating opponent now holds the fire when spawning bombs on later stages.
- Reduced secondary opponent's respawn rate (for early stages and easier difficulty).
- Reduced fire rate of walking opponents.
- Reduced quantity of scattered tires on easier difficulty.
- Tire sprite outline is now a little darker.
- Adjusted Parasite's beam collision box.
- Increased Parasite's 3-way shooting interval.
- Updated description of "Less Hard" difficulty option.
- Updated load/save/new game brief descriptions.
- Added savegame informations before starting a new game.
FIXES:
- No more opponent is spawned after you hear the gong.
- Gamepad's select button in the controls page now works again.
- Drones are no more automatically destroyed when you wreck the Deployer.
- Fixed loss of progress caused when reloading a save state.
- Fixed bonus stage 4 bug preventing the timer to work.
- Fixed collision bug between beam shot and enemy shield.
- Money earned playing Parasites's intro stage are now kept after a quick restart.
- "Invincible" achievement trigger is no more randomly activated.
- Achievement "Car-ball favourite" now triggers on the spot.
- Other minor fixes.