Endless Tactics · build 25012966 · published
With the launch of Trial Run, I've been quite busy the last few weeks to say the least... Doing what I enjoy the most, of course - fixing player issues; with lots of optimizations as dessert!
Special thanks to Merly23, one of our commissioned artists, who took his time to review and write detailed feedback on the points of attriction for the beginner UX (I'm starting to sense a pattern here...); that alone would render a patch on itself, tho I took my time to merge it with several Forms' complaints & suggestions, plus reviews on PlaytestQuest once again (a service that I highly recommend for any fellow indie dev reading this).
Please have some patience, as this will be quite a overwhelming (much like the tutorial was - and still likely is a bit, let's be honest for a sec - before this huge patch) amount of...
BRAND NEW BEGINNER UX MECHANIC - Tutorial Tooltips! A new, completely non-invasive way of providing additional explanations for Unit Types, Attacks, Specials, and more. They dynamically follow your cursor and are only displayed once for each situation - hopefully giving you the information you need without throwing yet another wall of text in your face.
MAJOR Tutorial Dialogue Rework: General dialogue reduction, with redundant lines trimmed down and explanations made much more to-the-point. The "New Guide Entry" dialogue prompt has also been removed and replaced with a dedicated button you can press whenever you want during the tutorial, alongside a brand new "Skip Dialogue" button right next to it. By default, this cuts roughly 1/4 of the Tutorial's dialogue.
Merged Unlock Popups & Mission Summary! Both have now been consolidated into a single, skippable screen, massively reducing redundancy and those admittedly intrusive popups.
General Reduction to Intrusive UI! Popups and other unnecessary UI components have been trimmed down across the board. Resource bars (Fuel & Gold) will now also dynamically hide whenever they're not actually needed.
Major Balance Reworks: Enemy/Nest Scaling, Unit Stats (Tanks & Artillery especially), Unlock Progression, certain Artifact Rarities, and more have all been reworked. "Random Artifact" will also now prefer giving you an Artifact you've already stacked, helping avoid situations where a single random roll accidentally turns every Unit into a recoil machine...
MAJOR Enemy AI Improvements! Enemies should now stand around doing absolutely nothing considerably less often, while also being much more aggressive when stuck around Obstacles.
BRAND NEW Manual Path Mode! Hold its hotkey to manually draw any movement path you want. It's completely dynamic to Move Costs and will automatically self-correct whenever you go over your available movement budget. Mainly intended to remove some of the friction when using Units with Heated Treadmill to cleanse Corruption; otherwise, the game will continue automatically selecting the most efficient and least harmful path as normal. Based on player feedback.
Dynamic "(HOLD)" Button Feedback: All buttons requiring you to hold an input now provide dynamic visual feedback while doing so.
Much Clearer Tutorial-Skipping Prompt.
"Complete X Mission" Tooltips now show the actual Mission and its current progress directly below them, removing some of the ambiguity surrounding beginner Unlocks.
More Dynamic Trial Run Difficulty: Added "Pity Dome Shields" to Trial Run Reinforcements whenever you're doing particularly badly.
Reduced SELKHET Obstacle Spawn Rate to make the early game flow a little faster.
HOLD TO TOGGLE Events Overlay Indicator! You can finally toggle off those blinking warning tiles if you want to.
Improved Current Selection Mode Indication, including additional Attack Mode information and better overall readability.
MAJOR General Optimizations! Much better lazy/background loading through Multithreading, eliminating most of the first-time stutters when loading the Shop, Units, and other assets. Menus should also perform considerably better overall.
HUGE Level-Loading Reduction! Terrain Generation, Resource Loading, and UI Loading have all been heavily optimized, resulting in much shorter loading times overall.
MAJOR Dialogue & Video Optimizations! No more random stutters or FPS drops whenever the game decides it wants to show you some text.
HUGE General Code Cleanup. Because apparently the codebase wasn't already messy enough.
MAJOR Camera Scrolling Improvements: Improved both Board-Scroll Follow movement (when scrolling the gameboard with Keyboard/Controller and the camera follows at the edges) and Cursor Scrolling.
Major V-Sync Fix: Fixed V-Sync failing to properly disable on PCs without Mailbox V-Sync support.
Enabled Automatic Localization Switching based on your PC's language at last! Also fixed Intro text failing to properly translate.
New Fallen Meteorite Art & Portrait Art, by IknowKingRabbit! Fallen Meteorites are now also randomized visually.
Improved Ship Trail Recolors.
Polished Level Intro Animation & Cargo Ship Shadow Animations.
MAJOR Improvements to Steam Initialization: Added a new emergency fallback for Steam initialization issues, making even extremely rare initialization errors considerably less likely. Also fixed the previously reported initialization bug.
Confirmation Prompts for Corrupted Upgrades: The first time you attempt to buy one you'll now get a confirmation prompt - based on recent feedback regarding accidental purchases (as they increase difficulty).
Tons of Minor Bug & Inconsistency Fixes, alongside several rare Softlock & Crash fixes.
Not much to say this time. Just happy I've finally figured a non-invasive and organic way to deliver additional info (via contextual tooltips that dynamically follow the cursor) without having to bore yall with yet more pages of dialogue. And to those who were previously experienced bad performance on older setups, please let me know if any of it still persists, as I'm still doing plenty of optimization work on the regular ;)
Thirteen Black Cats, from "X" Twitter miserably dying at the Tutorial (which inspired the new "pity dome shields" mechanic) lol
As always, most of the feedback gathered and addressed from our Reddit.
Discord Server (Dev Updates)
- the_procrastinator