Hi everyone!
It's been a busy month. May featured a ton of new things from upgrades, to re-vamped abilities, to ascension work. Here's a summary of all we got to in the last month:
Upgrade Encounters
New special encounter (on the order of vendor and mystery encounters). Allows players to upgrade ships in their fleet. This was the “last missing vector” for roguelite progression. We added 4 encounters for these.
First 5 Ascension Levels
We will do the other 5 in a future milestone, but the real ascension content for the first 5 levels is in. This makes Free Play considerably more interesting.
Localized Fonts
Added fonts for Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. This should be the complete set of fonts we need, but obviously we will need loc QA to verify.
Sell Ships at Vendor
Another long-awaited feature. Unlocked with a Discovery (and upgradeable with further Discoveries).
Engineer Ability Redone as a Triggered Explosion
The old version of the Engineer lay traps ability just wasn’t fun enough. You had a limited number of uses and the traps exploded automatically. The new version lets you control when the traps explode, so there is some skill/timing. Then you can immediately lay a new trap field.
Added an option for 3 ships to roll as post mission loot. This gets “more ships” in the game.
Better map region expansion during generation (loots and path width are improved)
Added more colony techs in the Cobalt Tradepost
Vendor strings have more flavor
New vendor loot tables for buying credits and science
Walls
Final art
AI builds some walls now
Changed wall placement/obstruction handling to work better
Some better testing console commands for resource management
Stations can finally be constructed on top of ships
Mothership Retreat is now an unlocked feature (via Discovery)
Synergy System
Relics and relic drops are fully considered in the synergy system
Squadron deployment is an input to the synergy system
Changed health-per-pip on hitpoint bars to make them smaller
CP AI improvements (walls, general attacking, mission priorities, etc.)
Toned-down the Corrupter ingame FX
The big Discovery unlocks have a literal bigger button
Flux (metagame resource) income doubled for missions
More
Warp boons (3)
Backstories (6)
Icons
Metagame Discoveries (15)
Enhancements (9)
Relics (4)
Missions (1)
All enemy ability delays are at least 4 seconds now. We also added some randomization and delays in to make the gameplay more interesting.
Starting boons are better overall
Rocket turrets got pierce and shoot faster. Rocket and Bombard turrets are much better (with commensurate price increases).
Attack Drones got instant-hit projectiles
Shredders are not as good
Free Play sectors are 1 column shorter
Fixed several drone targeting issues
Fixed issues with region merging during map generation
Fixed ascensions not stacking
Fixed a crash during unit spawns
Wall minimap icons work correctly now
Fixed issue where dead squadrons would not be included in the relic affects text in post-mission rewards
Fixed issue where death-spiraling drones were counted as being alive
Fixed several issues in the synergy system (code and data)
Fixed several unit actions/abilities that were never meant to be shown to players so they are hidden
Colony details support embed data lookup
Many, many bugfixes for scrolling, navigation, and focus, especially with gamepad
Fixed relic encounters to have safeguards to disallow players from picking the same reward they might have previously picked in the same run
Adjusted exploration around objective goals to avoid turret placement exploits