It's been around a month since last update and for the entirety of the month I've been trying to put the game in its complete shape. I am glad to say that I think at the moment it is in its final shape from the core POV.
This month we have also hit 7300 wishlists... and I have still no words. Usually if you are in indie games world, you'd hear this magical number of 7000 wishlists being said left and right as a measure to know when the game is ready to be released and, well, in just few days shy of two months since demo release, i've hit that milestone. So thank you all for this!
I will go over the changes categorically, and while it is pretty big update, a very big part of my work was done on code architecture and internal systems that you simply can't see in the game, which allows me to integrate more and more game systems, that, well, are not available in demo (but will be present in full game).
Change list
Added Motherlodes - bigger clustered chunks of ore in the mine. Can be unlocked from skill tree. They give more ore rewards and can taunt slammers towards them
Rebalanced mine node, strip and core health and implemented tier-based scaling
Reworked Quakes once again.. I will be honest this skill has been the most difficult for me to figure out. I am so far happy with its current shape, however I will be monitoring feedback about it more closely so I can hopefully and finally get it to its final shape
Rebalanced COREBREAK Sink ore values. Before some later ores had insane value to themselves that would cause very easy acquisition of COREBREAKs with very low amount of ore.
Skill tree pricing has been completely updated. Lots of things cost differently now than they did before. Some things became expensive, some things became cheaper, etc. Now progression should feel much smoother
Introducing THE MIRROR - a semi-skill tree that gets unlocked after The Fracture(basically the end of the demo) that increases COREBREAK limit on each skill to 7, allows you to remove them from skills and redistribute them, and to disable certain skills on the main skill tree
Big performance optimization - this is a bit more technical, so... game should just run much better now.
Added Feedback sending option directly from the game in settings
Added ability to export and import Saves - this works via something called "save strings" and is supposed to work across different game versions (demo, full release, playtest, etc.)
Added Traditional Chinese as a language option
Navigation has been completely reworked. Now there will be two main tabs at the top of the screen: MAP and TREE, each getting their own sub-tabs for different systems.
Added navigation between planets when you are zoomed in a single planet
Removed the ability to start mining from the skill tree directly, as before there was no proper navigation, but now there is, hence it is not necessary for separate, smaller panel to exist
Added few Guides & Tooltips explaining basics of some more obscure mechanics
Made ore colors much easier to read on any surface
Updated certain text colorings to be consistent across different screens
Made certain hovering behavior more consistent
Added more graphics options for different looks
Bug Fixes
Chain Lightning both behavior and visuals have been fixed
Core HP remaining percentage incorrect display has been fixed
In certain instances on skill tree, some nodes were invisible or their hover would get clipped in other UI elements, should be fixed now
COREBREAK Sink now does not dump all the ore at once in certain instances
Hover and Click used to be consumed by multiple layers of UI (e.g. planet under a button in the main view, clicking and hovering were consumed by both at the same time), now it is consumed only the top most layer
Fixed Auto-Play checkbox background not being rendered
Localization fixes in various languages
Font fixes in locales where we used mixed fonts.
Closing thoughts: This will probably be the biggest update before game's launch for the demo. If anything changes, you'll hear about it both here and in discord, so please, join there and say hi, we are building a small community of people who love destroying planets for resource gain! ---> https://discord.gg/4eJqHFN6T4