So I've been taking into consideration your feedback and here are the complaints that came back the most:
- Lack of comprehension, especially around combos
- "Where's my cursor in all this chaos?"
- Repetitiveness in early game
- Lack of weapon unique identity
One issue is also that the best strategy at the moment consists of taking multiple times the same weapon. While I want this strategy to remain viable in some cases, it was not my design intention to have this option the strongest. So I tried to give back to combos the place I intended in the beginning.
Also, I got rid of weapon categories, because that was restrictive in creating unique weapon identities. But every weapon has a list of stats (now visible), and since not all weapons have the exact same stats, this naturally creates categories that you can take advantage of with "all" scope upgrades.
There is no "Balance" category because the patch note is already beefy and too many things have been done to be tracked properly.
Please keep in mind everything is subject to change, and expect things to be broken/unbalanced.
Your feedback matters, tell me what you like and dislike so I can improve.
Patch note TLDR:
- New weapons
- New feature: powers
- New mini boss
- Added soft tutorial layers
- Made things more self-explanatory
- Made a good bunch of QoL
- Early game kickstarted
- Reworked many weapons
- Lot of balancing
Powers — a whole new layer
Silly gnomes carrying gift boxes will now unlock powers: active abilities designed to switch the fate of a bad situation.
Weapons
- New weapon: Laser Shotgun
- New weapon: Sniper
- New weapon: Bazooka
- Spear reworked so it actually feels like a spear
- Laser Lance renamed Laser Beam — reworked, now a big beam that pierces everything, producing a big rectangular AoE
- Flamethrower reworked as a new short range weapon
- Uzi reworked as a burst
- Multiple copies of the same weapon each track their own independent stats
- Weapon level caps at 3, with a tech to push it up to 6
- Weapon stats are shown in the tech screen and in weapon selection, weapon rows are hoverable so you can inspect them
- Added stats: cooldown, duration, range
- Removed stats: beam pulse rate, beam lifetime
Upgrades
- Upgrade rules simplified: only weapon and all applicable scopes remain. Every weapon-scope upgrade also exists in all-scope
- The draft never offers duplicates, and never offers the same upgrade at two different tiers
- Range upgrades introduced
- Combo damage upgrade introduced
- Animal slow upgrades introduced
- Ego upgrade introduced (compounding % increase + full heal)
- Hovering a luck card or the luck line shows the per-tier draw odds with a "current → new" preview
New Currencies
Three separate wallets instead of one:
- Tears for utilities tab
- Blood (earned by shatapping, spent on weapons and combos)
- Sweat (earned by winning a run). Can sometimes be needed for some techs
Tech Tree
- Tooltips on every tech for better explanation
- Weapon and combo descriptions now appear under the relevant tech
- Starter weapon techs; the weapon chest is no longer a tech
- Tech for max weapon level, tech for gnome count, techs for power duration and power strength
- Upgrade tier tech +2 levels
- Ego tech icon now matches its upgrade icon
- Better gamepad navigation throughout
- Tech descriptions aligned and given consistent widths
Bosses & Enemies
- Weapon crates are now awarded after each mini-boss
- Mini-bosses are now random and spread across more waves
- New antler mini-boss
- Mini-Boss Roulette — mini-boss waves roll a slot machine to decide what you're about to fight, and you stop it yourself
- Final bosses are always a one-shot kill — winning against a boss that already hurt you felt wrong
- Vertical movement speed lowered so a threat from the top reads as dangerous as one from the side
- No chatter bubbles on bosses and mini-bosses
UI/UX/QoL
- New tutorial for combos, shatap, powers
- Visual aim helper on gamepad, plus a setting to tune stick aim-assist intensity
- Resizable window option
- Right stick navigation
- Telemetry opt-out in settings
- Bolder cursor for aiming
- Chatter bubbles from short-range weapons are always reachable
- Forest biome illustration
- Run-over screen polished
Bug Fixes & Performance
- Attempt to fix the rare case where a single unit can get stuck behind an obstacle.
- Fixed lag from beams against dense packs of units
- Fixed a rare crash on launching a run
- Possible fix for issues on integrated graphics. (Your laptop should pick the GPU instead of the integrated graphics, hopefully.)
- Fixed the speed-up lock bug when opening settings
- Fixed gamepad navigation leaking between settings and the tech tree
- Fixed mouse/gamepad fighting over checkbox hover
- I'm pretty sure there was more :D...