In this update, the Pallet of the game has shifted to a more grim setting. All of the colors mesh well together versus before being kind of all over the place. Animations have been added to nearly every weapon/effect in the game, aside from a few item effects that still need a pass. Animations have been normalized to similar quality as well to bring the art together. 2 New Base Weapons:
Acid claws-Fast attacking claws that deal physical damage and have a high chance to apply poison DOT's, great for single target damaging. Frozen Steel-Become a Samurai with this new ice based Katana, slash and pierce dozens of enemies at once with high projectile count, leading to huge screen clear.
5 New "Chaos" Items:
These items are meant to add to the fullscreen chaos, acquiring them will feel like another weapon that fires much less often, but could potentially create full screen chaos and fun if you find a few of them.
Blackwall Maw- Chomp the battlefield
Killscreen Printer- Gain a chance to drop a giant Kill screen among a large cluster of enemies
Traffic God- Trains? Trains. Send random trains flying through crowds of enemies.
Orbital Junkyard-Why are aliens sending garbage to our planet? This item drops orbital junk straight into the fold, dealing damage in areas.
Skyblade-It's raining swords now!
2 New Evolutions:
Tox Shocks-A Large charging lazer that applies fast stacking poison DOTS and chaining Acid Lightning. All around great damage
Glacial Hammers-Replace HammerDrones with large Ice Hammers that smash enemies they collide with and slam the ground creating Ice Shards that pierce all enemies. 1 New Operator:
Ryu-The way of the Samurai lives on in Ryu, who's base weapon is Frozen Steel. Ryu starts with +1 dodge charge.
UI Overhaul:
The user interface has been overhauled to look much better. This is still very much a WIP and could really use feedback on whether the main menu screen is cool with the draggable operators, or just very annoying. I'm trying to get around having to use rows and columns of operators to select from like many other games do, and instead have a more lively character experience. Optimization:
Getting rid of rendered effects in favor of Sprite effects has had a large impact on game performance, weapon attacks look much better and more satisfying. Better use of sprite atlases and normalizing a few things to batch more efficiently has also improved the performance, especially when there's 500+ enemies on screen. Applying spatial grids and row based Y-sorting, as well as more efficient methods of checking collision and pathfinding have also contributed to an increased performance gain. I'm probably missing a few things, as this update has changed a LOT, here's a condensed version: Game run better, game look better, game more fun! What's next? More weapon evolutions would most likely be my next focus, as they all have at least 1 and some have a few. I don't want to have a standardized "documentation" telling players what evolutions are created from what, I'd much rather get to a point where there's a good chance each weapon could combine with another random weapon you choose and get both to level 8. That's going to require a LOT more evolutions, but I think there's a good start to base weapons, and so I'll be focusing on evolutions more now. As always, I'm looking for more ways to optimize as well, and possibly hope to get some local co-op implemented. Until next time, Wishlist, join the discord, play the demo, and leave feedback! Thanks, Nic Cyberpunk.