Ability Charges + Ship Ability Rework
Really excited about this change. Ship abilities have been a bit inconsistent in their designs. Divider felt like it struck a good balance between utility/damage and skillful usage with it's cooldown reduction but a lot of abilities felt very very basic (Burrl). Felt a bit too impactful either early on or later but didn't have a good scaling mechanic. So I've spent some time to implement the 'Ability Charge' mechanic. Each ship has a different way of gaining these charges which often involve offensive usage of the ship's ability.
Here's an example of Foxxl's
All ships have progressive power gains as you gain charges and most of them have an "ultimate" unlock once you hit a very high amount of charges. My hope is this encourages more interesting usage of abilities and a much higher risk/reward factor to each use.
Content Additions
2 new weapons
Balance changes
Player ships
- All ships turn speed has been increased. This is just a general game feel thing I want to try. I think it's a bit more fun if you have slightly more control over your ship and increasing the turn speed overall gives you a lot more control.
- Starformer's ability encourages sitting still so to help with this it's also getting an additional max armor and faster turn speed. To offset this it's max speed has been reduced significantly.
Items
Starter weapons overshadowing other options a bit. I want to make them a little less powerful so that other weapons are more appealing.
- Single laser does not have any variance in it's angle but has about 20% less range and shoots slightly slower.
- Ion Splitter does not have any variance in it's angle but has about 20% less range and shoots slightly slower.
- Changed how weapons randomly generate: Basically very strong weapons will have a bit less of a chance to appear early. Random weapons will also try to give you a weapon that's different than the types you currently have equipped, that way it's easier to take advantage of excess ammo by switching weapons.
Enemies
- Some enemy projectiles are a bit slower but most of them fire a bit more frequently as well. Trying to make the game a bit more transparent so slowing projectiles down a bit helps with the second to second legibility of the game.
- It was a bit to easy to get multiple healers + shielding ships in a wave that caused them to become incredibly hard to kill. It's now only possible to spawn one healer or shield ship per wave.
- Armor pods on final encounter can drop more armor boxes to help you sustain during that fight.
Quality of Life Improvements
Big one here is you can now switch to a non-pixel font! This was a LOT of work, I basically had to rewrite most of the UI to accommodate this but I do understand that the pixel font is not super readable for everyone and I want the game to be as accessible as possible. Along with this I've added Ukrainian to the list of languages the game is translated into!
- You can hover over your ability/item/weapons in game to get a tool tip description
- While focusing on weapon drop it will also show a the tool tip of the currently equipped weapon to help you compare
- When a weapon does 0 damage (fire/acid/frost weapons) it will not show a "hit" effect when it comes in contact with something
- Lots of cleanup/improvements to menu buttons
- Post game score screen redesigned to overlap less often
- Ship selection screen redesigned to include details about the ship's ability
- Lots of enemy projectiles have a more prominent "flash" frame which should help with visibility of these projectiles.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed an issue with movement that prevented full speed movement in certain situations (Twin stick controls on K/M going sideways)
- Fixed a bug where players would go underneath buff stations
- Fixed a bug that caused creature inside final boss to "sweep" the area with it's beam, which was nearly impossible to avoid.
- fixed a bunch of hard coded strings for translations
What's next?
I think I've got one more large update in me for this game. I really want to add some mid range "goals" to the game. So I want to add an in-game achievement system. In the next update I'm going to really focus on unlockables. I want to implement a bunch of new "build around" upgrades plus some advanced weapons that can be added to the pool to give as rewards for completing these achievements. Hopefully this gives players some mid range targets to work towards while they are trying to complete various difficulties in the game.