This is a big one!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3350900/Fogpiercer_Demo/
Ever since our last demo update, we've been hard at work implementing the save/load system, drawing illustrations, adding cards and improving the game overall.
There is a myriad of things that have changed, improved and been fixed. This update brings it all! The most important of them however is the run save/load system, additionally there are a couple of others, let's take a closer look.
Save/Load System
Whenever an encounter's been finished, the game will autosave the progress, and will offer to load the progress when you get back into the game. The runs now also support seeds and we'll be adding extra support.
At the moment the seed is only used to generate the map and encounters, we'll be adding support for the seeds to also generate the same enemies, cards, upgrades and more!
UI Improvements
Our previous post also looked at these, there are better popups, easier to find buttons, several screens have been merged together and more, some of my personal favourites:
the shop got a lot of love! new colours, panels, ability to reroll and improved animations
Watch on YouTube
selecting cards eveywhere got new VFX, SFX and juice!
choosing your save slot now makes it clearer which one of the lot is currently active
New range patterns
The game now allows us to design patterns that dynamically change depending on the grid, selected cell and the side of the grid on which the pattern is being applied. A couple of examples:
- AOE that covers an entire half of the map, depending on which half's grid cell the card targets
- AOE that covers an entire row of the map, or multiples of them, and they can also rotate around the mouse as their pivot point, depending on the side of the map that's selected
- AOE that covers the entire map, however only filters the cells with enemies
Watch on YouTube
this is a quick preview of what the new range pattern system is capable of
This was a refactor that's been needed and long time coming. Since we've started implementing the Harpoon, new and improved ways of utilizing range patterns has been necessary.
Multiple Environmental Hazards
Up till this point, the game only supported a single env. hazard being triggered at the same time, but since we really wanted to add a card to the game that would spawn a new one, this opened up the possibility of mulitple hazards having the same countdown.
Taking the opportunity, we coded the feature in and it's a fair amount of fun when you manage to utterly devastate the bandit group using 2 hazards that cut them off
Watch on YouTube
in an extreme case, you're able to cover the entire grid in env hazards!
Card upgrades/transforms
Some encounters (those with "Extra Rewards", but also random encounters) now offer powerful rewards such as Card Upgrading and Card Transform. The rewards found at random encounters are more powerful versions that give you more control.
Watch on YouTube
3 upgraded versions of the base Artillery card to choose from
Changelog
Enough about the highlights, time to take a look at the nitty gritty! Personally, this is my favourite part, it gives visibility to the work we've put in and also puts things generally into perspective when we, as a team, retrospectively want a quick overview of what happened when during development.
The changelog offers over 80 items detailing changes, additions and fixes. Check it out:
Added
- animations for when a card is Removed or Duplicated
- first step in making unlocking modules and cards more visually appealing
- Harpoon Carriage
- Available in the playtest version only
Changed
- Theming of the run over screen buttons
- Iron Rain
- target one half of the map instead of the full map
Fixed
- module tier 1 no longer auto activates
- modules can finally be deactivated again!
- Civil engineer typo
- removed an info button from the permanent currency panel, to stay consistent with the temporary currency panel
- removed mentions of the word "wagon" from localisation strings to keep consistency across the board
- enemies flying away are now properly scaled to imitate the effect of them disappearing in the depths of the universe
- Sabotaged enemies who die during their move turn no longer crash the game!
- extra stats panel no longer covers the settings panel
- is no longer triggered when an enemy moves to the same cell its on
- game no longer crashes when a support units ends its turn with death
- some cards would filter the grid for cell with non-existent enemies
- Improved environmental hazard checks
- Improved auto-victory checks
- Some debug options are now hidden in demo mode
- Max health is now properly saved in run data
- Total amount of Spikes now gets properly saved
- Better run seeds!
- when using the new "hover doesn't cancel the selected card", picking cards no longer activated their hover animations. (i.e. Picky Jester's effect)
- all popups can now be closed using "ESC"
- drivers not showing their cards in the new card's UI
- cards hovered before their data is set up no longer crash the game
- driver gauge can only be triggered in fights
- improved handling of the data of Detonate
- removed "Duplicate a card" reward from the first station
- "Spiked Hull" description: dmg -> damage
- Shop never giving 5 cards, even when it was supposed to
- cards of unavailable drivers show up as viewable
- upgraded cards no longer offer duplicate effects
- game no longer crashes when the locomotive button is pressed in rapid succession
- module and cards screen will now show UI properly when the run is started from there
- cards with are no longer discarded after x turns (edge case)
- Sticky Bomb no longer crashes the game if it's triggered due to the count down
- Selecting an upgrade too quickly no longer crashes the game
As you can see, we're actively developing the game, thank you all for the feedback and for playing the game! Since the Save/Load system is in now, you can expect smaller but more frequent updates for the Demo that improve UX, QoL and stability.
That's it for this one, thank you very much!