It is with great pleasure that I bring to you all the Saffron Update.
First off, let's start with the eye candy. This new update brings a new map into play - a close-quarters arena called Saffron Stadium where users start battles face-to-face. This intense map begins at full-throttle, with no time to wait to engage.
Next, I bring you the biggest and most asked for gameplay fix - a better system for quitting the game. Before, we had a quit button that'd appear when the player pressed the Menu button. In the heat of battle, players were accidentally quitting the game! Not good at all. Now, with the new system, the user holds down the menu button, a loading symbol appears, and THEN the menu appears.
Throughout the development of the game, we're learning a lot about what is usable and understandable to the player. Two things that I added to make gameplay easier to pick up include - the button of the ship being built is highlighted green so that it's obvious the Builder is building. Also, highlighted buttons no longer just enlarge, they turn yellow. On top of those menu fixes, ships now also turn yellow when they can be picked up, to help make more intuitive.
Finally, you know that I'm always working to improve performance and make the game run at its smoothest (just something that I need to learn more about and will continue to grow in). This patch, I upgraded my game engine (Unity3D) and the VR SDK (SteamVR 2.0). Both of these have helped performance a lot and open up new options in the future. On top of that, I re-engineered all of the physics layers in the game to cut down on interaction between objects, this way only the critical physic collisions are chewing up frame rate. Last but not least, I changed the loading structure of all the levels so that they load in the background now, and don't have a jarring transition scene-to-scene.
Other game play tweaks:
-Increased radius of the Seeker by 60%
-Ships stabilize if not given an assignment (rather than spinning out of control like before)
Other bug fixes:
-Sometimes holograms on controllers are switched Left / Right
-Sometimes the arrow on the hologram faces the wrong way
-Builder UI buttons disappear when a Spectre hides the Builder (makes it hard to press then, eh..?)
-Enemy ships can be revealed by waving controller at invisible ships (cheap, right?)
-Ambushing ships appear to be stuck at pillars on Incomplex
-Ship targets are not broken whenever a target goes invisible (that's not fair!)
-Holograms get stuck when selecting multiple times in the match
-Lowered Orbit's voice in Demo Room by 30%
(Yes, I am tracking and chasing down every last bug! Dedicated to perfection!)