Our time at Steam Next Fest has just ended, and to wrap this up, here's one of the biggest Updates of recent! Unlike the likes of the Apex Update, this one's complexity lies a lot more beneath where the naked eye can see, but you'll more than surely feel the difference nonetheless. To start with, the "Trial Run" (aka first operation, aka tutorial) has been reworked from the ground up! New players should (and statistically are, as player retention has thankfully greatly increased since I dropped it) have a much better experience. I of course couldn't begin without mentioning how much of a relief it is to see all known memory leak AND shred of performance degradation squashed away from Endless Tactics; for good this time. Due to a bunch of tiny little "oddities" lying around old code (and obscure engine interactions/issues), the object count of the game was essentially rising at every time you went from screen to screen, so in practice, after a few hours of consecutive play, it'd lag even in the main menu - and that felt horrible of course. So after spending 10h a few days in a row investigating upon it and refactoring code, I've been finally able to stop worrying about these, and actually get on with juicer stuff such as the Tutorial Rework above (more similar reworks to come soon btw). Without beating around the bush anymore, here are the actual...
CHANGES
Tutorial Rework - Previously a major point of contention amongst new players... now featuring a pretty cool (imo) pre-scripted event, Mechs, a boss (Apex) battle, and a much more climatic ending (all while being lore friendly and maybe setting some stuff up for a certain post launch update). Missions and Dialogues have of course being properly rearranged to accomodate for these, making the beginner progression also feel much more natural.
FINAL FIX to Performance Degradation - Expanding upon last Update's very important fixes/improvements to Multithreading, I have now completely reworked the game's resource-loading, to a much more scalable and bootup-time friendly lazy-loading architecture! Cyclic references are a thing of the past now, at last, and overall the game should be much more efficient at loading only what's actually necessary from the start. You can now finally play Endless Tactics endlessly and not feel like your PC is slowly dying. Base performance has also, by the way, been greatly increased by adjacent optimizations done with the bunch; all in all the game should feel much lighter and stable (performance wise) on all systems and circumstances. An FPS counter has also been added in the Options Menu for those who wanna see it for themselves.
Countless Text Revisions - To Dialogue, Missions, Upgrades, UI, Abilities, etc... Also including font properties, and all kinds of tweaks to make it all more readable, intuitive, and natural for the eye... And furthermore, Dialogue-logic has also been greatly improved (queueing, anti-repeat measures, etc.).
New Legendary Artifact Cornucopia - Makes Destroyable Obstacles have a chance to drop random Crates rather than Resources! (affected by drop-chance upgrades)... plus a minor reworks/cleanups to destroyable objects logic to make it more scalable.
MAJOR General Fixes (too many for me to list them, really).
More Upgrade UX Improvements.
Internal Rework to Drops - Part of the optimizations and cleanups mentioned above; also meaning several improvements to drops-picking/spawning logic.
Corrupted Cores for both Surge and Spawn-Blocking!
Glitchy Text effect toggle (For those who get visually annoyed by it anyhow).
MORE MAJOR Improvements to Input-Mapping - Better UI overall + now it highlights which input is actually conflicting, out of each Action! Significant changes to internal remapping logic as well.
Tons of Feedback-based UX Improvements (shout out to Tichat002 from weplaytestgames.com, for bringing them to light)!
Nests now display exactly how much self-damage will they take
Targets will now show their total HP after the "/" whenever highlighting them on Attack-selection.
Single Threaded Mode (at Options).
Major UI Improvement to Operation Statistics.
Major Balance Changes - to once bring the late game's foes more in line with a scaled up player's capabilities. Also plenty more to reduce beginner friction.
Huge Boot Time Speed Up - the game should take roughly half the time to boot up now!
... Been a quite productive 2 weeks interval overhaul. Spent more nights up than I can count reworking all of these systems, but in the end it does look very much like it was worth it. Next Fest (trial run) numbers weren't great, sadly, but that was kinda expected due to the extremely short time window it had in beforehand. The feedback, community interaction, and therefore improvements made have more than made up for it, however. It's always good to see player-sentiment (via forms and such) improve, and I'll keep at it as always!
As always, most of the feedback gathered and addressed from our Reddit.
- the_procrastinator