It's a big one folks. Nearly every game system in the game got a little bit of love in this one.
Frost Status
Introducing a new status element to the game. This can effect both players and enemies so be careful. Slows ships effected to a crawl making them easier to pick off. This status is sprinkled throughout the game in several ways and will continue to be added in the future:
- New enemies with frost status
- New weapons with frost status
- Rainbow weapons shoot frost projectiles as well and cost more ammo to fire
- Frosty traps around planets in later regions
Content
- Three new surge levels to conquer (up to 8 total now)
- New system augment: System Hazard
- Two new variations of station events have been added.
- Clearer instructions on how to complete the defense station events.
- Two new upgrades.
Quality of Life
- Items have had their hit boxes significantly reduced, this should make it easier to "target" specific items without having to pick up or scrap overlapping items before you can get to the others.
- The mini map has a better indication when the system is being attacked.
- Regions with "Deadeye Presence Detected" will show the Deadeye fleet's position on the map.
- Traders will attempt to avoid enemy ships to not take collateral damage as much.
- Improved the readability of ships that are being healed by other ships.
- Weapons that are deadly to players will show a indication of the area they are deadly.
- Added more translated strings + new language option (Spanish (Spain))
Balance
- Tac T Ion has an additional max armor to start and cooldown of drone ability reduced by 1 second.
- Fliiboi's shield charge rate increased slightly and max charge before breaking reduced slightly.
- Charging area for station defense events increased slightly.
- Reduced scaling of Deadeye transports.
- Reduced scaling of small slow moving missile ships so that they take much longer to require multiple hits to kill.
Fixes
- Fixed an issue where loading a run would spawn additional progression upgrades.
- Fixed an issue where loading a run would mess with the wave spawning timers.
- Fixed an issue with Overload upgrade's second level not assigning fire rate increases.
- Overload's visuals have been reworked to not be so strobe like.
- Fixed a crash when you opened a weapon and equipped it immediately causing the object to fail a check later on.
Update on Early Access Progress
Good news! We are getting really close to moving out of early access. I have one more milestone feature I want to add which is the story elements to the beginning and end of the game. I think the way players are introduced to the universe this is set in is pretty weak right now and would like to ground them a bit more. I also think the ending feels a bit anti-climatic, final boss feels really good but the way it wraps up after that feels a bit mediocre, in my opinion. So I'm going to spend several weeks focusing on how I want to relay those story beats.
Additionally I want scope out Switch development a bit more, mostly to see how much work it's going to be to port. Ideally I'd like to launch the Switch version with the release into full version but I want to make sure that's a realistic goal before I commit to it.
I'm excited to be so close to fully releasing this game! I'm hoping you are too.