This update entails a bit of a kink in the road as we adjusting the game towards a marketable online game, we were mainly busy simplifying progression and UI controls.
We should see a lot faster progress in the future with a lot of new helping hands on the team, but in the mean time we also have a few brand new weapons...
Demo becomes playtest version
We’ve decided to close the publicly available demo for Diode Arena in favor of a playtesting program, this allows us to hand out a controlled number of playtesting versions via Steam, which we believe will serve us better in marketing and building a succesful release for the game.
Progression simplification
After a lot of feedback and deliberation we decided to overhaul the system of currencies and unlocks in Diode Arena to make for a much more straightforward system.
Silver and gold vouchers designed to unlock 1 specific thing have been fully removed from the game
The game now tracks total XP which contributes to levels. Every level-up the player gets specific rewards, some guaranteed, some random.
The game now relies on 3 main currencies:
Diode credits: earned freely trough play and used to buy parts
Tech coins: earned trough level-ups, used to unlock technologies
Vouchers: generic premium currency used for cosmetics and special unlocks such as garage slots, some can be earned at random from level-ups.
All items in the game will be available for purchase for some combination of these 3 currencies, in particular garage slots will now cost a growing number of vouchers depending on the number of slots already owned.
UI Overhaul continued
Logging in will pass the player straight from the main menu into the battle (previously deploy) menu
In order to simplify the menu flow players will no longer be allowed to delete their last bot, you must always have at least one
Menu context tabs will now all be displayed at the top of the screen in stead of mixing top and left side bars
The overhaul is not yet finished! In particular we’re still working on…
A career/progression page for viewing XP, rewards, levels, owned items etc.
A store page which will feature cosmetics, skins and other IAPs
Many more style fixes
Debugging
New map and 1v1 mode
We have added an experimental new 1v1 game mode for private (custom) matches and a small map to go with it. This new map is also an experiment with using Unity Asset store assets to speed up environment design time
Minor changes
Added a flamethrower weapon
Flamethrowers do a lot of damage in short range and set target on fire
On-fire targets will continuously take damage, this damage affects outer parts first and travels in towards the core
Added a minigun weapon
Alternative to the plasma guns that has a higher rate of fire at the cost of increased bullet spread and slower swivel speed.
To accomodate the new UI a lot of in-game reward calculations have been overhauled! There is also a new score screen which gives accurate information about level progress
We have removed Bakery lighting and returned to default Unity URP setup for lighting, this should help to simplify and speed up development as well as reduce download siwe, although we might have remaining lighting issues in the short term.
The final phase of elimination will now have a timer to push players to finish the match and add a finish condition in case all remaining players have been crippled
When dying in elimintation mode, rewards will be awarded immediately similar to free mode. This means you don’t have to wait until the end of the match to receive play rewards. Rewards will be calculated assuming a loss though, so you only ‘win’ elimination by making it to the end.
Bugfixes
Level border walls now use a new simple shader that lights up with proximity to the active camera. This is replacing an older deprecated approach which has been broken for a few versions leading to invisible walls
Discovered a bug where projectile buffer could overflow and leave dangling visuals that last forever, e.g. rockets that phase trough everything and fly off to infinity. A new check will now make sure to delete the old projectile visual.
While overhauling menus, discovered a bug where adding a email and password to an existing account would not use the correct input field for password and thus not work
Fixed bug where undoing a part deletion would not trigger the correct part count/purchase logic, leading to negative part counts