Hey everyone. This update is mostly about the late game. We are talking about the part where the screen fills up, the framerate falls over, and you die without ever seeing what killed you. All three of those issues got fixed, and a lot of smaller things got improved alongside them. Here is what changed.
Past wave twenty the game was grinding to a halt, and it was our fault in three separate places at once. Every bullet on screen used to be a little cloud of particles, and every one of those clouds was drawn separately. In a late wave that means thousands of things to draw for what you see as a few dozen shots. Bullets are now drawn all at once in a single pass, no matter how many there are. Every bullet was also checking its distance against every enemy on the field on every single frame. Bullets now only look at the ground immediately around them, which is the only place they could possibly hit anything. The sound system was doing the same thing to your CPU. A busy fight was starting hundreds of sounds a second, which is far more than could actually be played. That is why audio started crackling and stuttering around wave twenty. There is now an audio budget. The sounds that matter play, and the ones that would have been lost in the noise are dropped before they cost anything. None of this changes how anything looks or sounds. It just means the game keeps up when it gets busy.
There was no limit on how many enemies could be alive at once. None. By wave twenty seven they were spawning faster than any build could possibly clear them, so they just piled up until the game choked. That is not difficulty. It is a bug wearing difficulty's coat. There is a ceiling now, and it rises with the wave. Late waves are still crowded. They are no longer mathematically unwinnable.
If eight enemies touched you on the exact same frame, you took all eight hits instantly from full health. That is how a lot of runs were ending, and there was nothing you could have done differently. Damage is now gated. There is a limit to how much health you can lose in a short window, and after a hit you get a brief moment of invulnerability to get out. You can still die in a crowd. You just have to actually be losing the fight first. Lifesteal is capped alongside it.
We have to be straight with you about this one. With the damage gate added and lifesteal uncapped, some builds were flatly unkillable, healing far faster than anything could hurt them. Lifesteal now heals up to a ceiling that scales with how much you have invested in it. If you were running a heavy lifesteal build, it is still strong. It is just no longer immortal.
We added a short red flare around the edge of the screen when you take damage. "Did I just take damage" was a real question people were asking, and now it is not.
Enemy bullets were the same pale color as yours. People were walking into them thinking they were their own shots, which is exactly the sort of death that feels unfair because it is. Enemy fire is red now and shaped differently. It is a hollow pulsing orb instead of your bright tracer. Your own shots got thinner and shorter at the same time, so a screen full of your own bullets no longer buries what is coming back at you.
Hitting something with a corrosive or chilling effect used to make a little burst of color, and then nothing for the entire duration. There was no way to tell a poisoned enemy from a healthy one. Affected enemies now carry a faint glow in the effect's color for as long as it lasts. The glow is deliberately faint. It is enough to read a crowd at a glance, but not enough to light up the screen.
Altars are placed well outside your view on purpose. Reaching one is meant to be a trip. However, nothing pointed you toward it, so a lot of you never found them at all. There is a marker at the edge of the screen now pointing the way, with the distance under it. It fades out on its own once the altar is in view.
A few of you pointed out that the star looked like a flat image pasted onto the arena. Great in the menu, lifeless in a run. Fair point.
The surface now leans and flows with the direction you are moving.
Firing throws a flare off the star's edge, so shots leave the star instead of appearing near it.
Neutron star jets were rebuilt from scratch. They used to be particles, and they looked it.
Blue Supergiant and Red Giant also had a hard edge where their corona was being cut off mid glow. It fades out properly now.
"I played for twelve minutes and got a hundred Stardust" came up a lot, and it was a fair thing to be annoyed about. We had two problems, and both were ours. The first problem was that Stardust only counted how long you lasted and what level you hit. Nothing else. Killing three thousand enemies paid exactly the same as killing three hundred. Beating a boss paid nothing at all. Everything you actually did in the run was worth zero. The second problem was that surviving deeper paid worse per minute, not better. Every minute past the tenth was worth less than the one before it, because leveling slows down and nothing else was picking up the slack. The hardest part of a run was the least rewarded part. Both are fixed.
Every enemy you kill pays.
Every boss you beat pays.
Later waves pay more than earlier ones. Surviving to wave 25 is worth far more than reaching wave 12 twice.
A twelve minute run is now worth a bit over twice what it was. A twenty five minute run is worth around three and a half times what it was. Fully unlocking the store went from something like seventy runs to around thirty. The death screen now shows you the breakdown. Waves, bosses, kills, and level each have their own line. You can see what paid and what did not, which was the other half of the problem. Even when the number was fine, nothing told you how to make it bigger.
Fixed a crash when pressing any non number key on the Relic Altar's offer screen.
Fixed bass sounds distorting and crackling in dense fights.
Fixed the Blue Supergiant and Red Giant coronas being clipped into a visible ring.
New game icon added.
This needs an explanation rather than a bullet point. The VSync toggle never worked the way it claimed to. Turning it off did not uncap your framerate. It dropped the game to a slideshow while the counter cheerfully reported 240, because the counter was measuring the wrong thing. It also broke video capture. Streaming the game froze other browser sources in OBS for anyone who had it switched off. We tried three times to fix it, and each attempt traded one broken behavior for another. We have removed the setting entirely rather than ship an option that lies to you. The game runs the way it always did with VSync on, which is what almost everyone was already using. If you had it switched off, you do not need to do anything. The setting is simply ignored from this build on. The FPS limit slider is untouched and still does exactly what it says.
Every single thing in this patch came from someone taking the time to say what was wrong. Keep the feedback coming. See you in the field. Join the Community
Want to talk about your builds or tell us about your latest run? Come hang out on our Discord server and follow us on Twitter for the latest updates.
Twitter: @_fortytwostudio
Discord: Join our server