- The Bit Blaster XL Soundtrack by Spifftune is now available for FREE as DLC (includes one new track) Get it here!
- Reworked ALL in game menus to be more consistent and ‘professional’ across all menus. Can use either a keyboard, a mouse or a gamepad. I understand that the menus are only now in line with what videogames should all have at the most basic, but was a big deal for me to learn and code it to work this way. (please let me know if there are bugs) Looks less like it was designed by an amatuer in his garage studio. *cough*
- There is a new Bomb weapon in the game. Pressing ‘Y’ on the gamepad or ‘ALT’ on the Keyboard should activate it. Each ship has different amounts of bombs to start and they can be found randomly floating in space. There is also a bit of UI changes to show the new bomb setup in both the ship select screen and the gameplay UI.
- The Laser power up is now nearly twice as long and far more effective, as well it has had at total overhaul to make it look cooler.
- The Magnet power up is now more powerful at pulling objects and costs less ammo while working and has had a slight GFX modification
- The Trail power up has been modified to make all singular trail bullets also move within their own small circles, really increasing the effectiveness of this power up
- The Heatseeking power up has been entirely rewritten and should now correctly reduce ammo as well as not double up or just disappear. It also now has a new look and a slight explosion upon collision that can take out multiple objects like the explode shot.
- Grow Shot has been modified to have Increased size of break-off bullets
- Through Shot has been modified to look more like a rail shot bullet, to hopefully better indicate that it goes through objects until it hits a wall
- Bounce Shot now has a slight green flash to it to set it apart from enemy bullets a little bit more while still remaining difficult enough to be balanced.
- Explode shot has had its rate of fire reduced slightly as well as has been shrunk slightly.
- Split shots rate of fire reduced slightly
- Bomb, Boost, and Shield pickups now look more impressive and should stand out better when things get a little crazy.
- Now fully supporting ultrawide displays and all sorts of bizarre resolutions.
- Should now properly allow uncommon resolutions to be detected in video menu.
- Braking now uses half the resources as boost, allowing for much better control
- There are now increased Invincibility frames after losing a shield! The player will receive 1.5 seconds of immunity as well as a flashing ship to showcase it.
- The screen will now shake when you use a bomb, lose a shield, die, or crash into a wall. (a small changed but makes a huge impact)
- Resolved various spawning issues for Ultrawide displays, including but not limited to ammo spawning, enemy spawning, power up spawning and various GUI elements.
- Updated pause legend to have black background and new +Bomb pickup
- Updated all Text/Font in game and increased its clarity
- Optimized all textures to be better looking for all resolutions
- Modified powerups so they don’t spawn to close to walls
- Removed some unnecessary debug logs from here and there just to be cleaner
- The instructions for both auto and manual fire modes have been updated to reflect any changes.
- Bit Blaster XL is now using the latest version of Unity engine
I spent some time and cleaned up the Unity launcher binding labels to make it more easy to understand naming conventions (hopefully helping those who rebind controls) - Enemy00’s Speed now increases as the round goes longer
- Enemy01a (small meteor bits) will now shrink, pop, and then despawn if they’ve spent too long floating on the screen instead of just disappearing.
- Enemy04 Now chases the player at an increasing speed as the game goes on, as well as taking shorter breaks each time it stops.
- Enemy05 Now stops and shoots bursts multiple times as it crosses the screen, with bigger bursts depending on how long its survived. Also has new effect showing charging up shot.
- Modified some mid-later round (20000+) balancing with enemy spawning and points allocation, to make the franticness a more balanced of a variety of enemies as well as more reasonable to allow average players to get higher achievements and expert players to get even further.
- Later in game rounds (35000+ points) will spawn more effective powerups for crowds far more often than the less powerful or utility power ups
- There is now slightly more time in between powerup spawns so multiple don’t wind up on the screen at the same time
- Ammo intro + tutorial enemy now spawn in a different location for better visibility
- Bit Blaster XL will now correctly run in the background when its window is not the focus
- Pause Menu Overhaul with new style menus
- Sound when ammo runs outs. Also blink red ammo
- Cleaned up nickervision support page and made buttons bigger and clearer
- Cleaned up garbage collection and resolved minor lag spikes
- Tidied up entire project behind the scenes. Removed redundancies, unused textures, out of date files and renamed many assets, making flow smoother.
- Upgraded to latest available Steamworks SDK and Steamworks.Net implementation
- Fixed alignment of some swapping GFX in instructions
- Bombs destroy powerups, but ammo stays.
- **New Leaderboard for V3.0 forward. The old V2.1 Scores are still saved, and you can still access V2.1 through the BETA tab in Steam if you prefer.**
Thank you everyone for playing and sharing the game with your friends and family. Bit Blaster XL now has over 125,000 players, I am BLOWN away!.
If you are really enjoying Bit Blaster, make sure to leave a brief Steam Review and let others know to check it out.
-Adam Nickerson