I've really blown up the achievements this update! That and much more in this update. I'm really excited to hear what you think!
In Game Achievements & Unlock System For a while now people have noted a lack of "meta progression" in the game and while there is some it's rather opaque and very light. I wanted to solve a couple of issues with this update:
Give players mid range goals while playing each run (besides just completing it) Make the progression leveling system more transparent So I built the achievement system directly into the game and gave it an interface where players can clearly see what they can unlock and how far along they are in the progression leveling. I'm also hoping dying in the game feels a little less bad because you have a much better chance of unlocking a new upgrade or item for your next run!
New Mechanic: Virus I've added a sneaky new mechanic to incentivize high risk/high reward gameplay. The basic idea is if you contract this virus you'll die in any one hit but you can remove it by powering up 3 shield structures. There's a handful of ways to get this right now but I don't want to spoil them for you and some ways to flip it into a positive!
Core Content Added a few dozen upgrades and weapons in this update, one for nearly every single achievement in the game. There's quite a few other updates:
About a dozen more ship theme unlockables (exp points needed to level up has been squished a bit to compensate) Doubled the number of ship trails unlockables Rescue mission has been reworked entirely New type of rescue mission will be more regularly found in star systems. Gear containers now have a new tier but I'm not gonna say how you get them... Asteroids have a very small chance of breaking off a very valuable (and fast) chunk Completely reworked a few "Starter" (Yellow) upgrades. I felt these were a little bland for my initial idea of them being the key upgrade you "build around". Most of the boring ones have been reworked into something that feels a bit more active or has impact on your decisions throughout the game. Note about new upgrades: I really tried to focus upgrades around building synergies between things that are typically not all that good. Frost effects are pretty ineffective alone but nice to have attached to other things so introduced upgrades that play off of this aspect.
Quality of Life Updates
If upgrades have an effect after a certain number of actions they will show the current count on the icon. Balance Swtcbade's starting weapon was strong all the way until the end game. I don't think that's very fun design so I've replaced it with something considerably weaker though still arguably more powerful than a lot of other ship's starting weapons. Tac T Ion's ability is really easy to snowball and at full power you could get an insane amount of drones out with the cooldown reduction. Picking up salvage will reduce the cooldown by half as much and the base cooldown of the ability has been increased 1 second. Bug fixes Fixed an issue where the UI would disappear in the tutorial Fixed some issues with save files saving items that shouldn't be Fixed some issues with sprite display in text Fixed a crash with circular ruin puzzle What's next? I'm winding down what I'll call "active development" on the game. With this update I feel pretty good about the amount of content and replayability the game has. I have a new project that I'm spinning up and you may hear about that soon. I'll also be listening and always trying to fix any bugs that come up. I can't say for certain if I'll do any more sizable updates but I may return every once in a while to introduce some new elements to shake things up or maybe I'll decide to do some DLC content down the road.
I'm also happy to announce I've signed an agreement to port the games to Switch, Playstation and Xbox! I'm really excited I'll get to see the game on consoles, it's like a dream come true for me!
Hey folks! Here's the first large update since launch! I've been shipping a lot of smaller updates to try and fix up some of the critical issues as quickly as possible but I've been working on this chonky update at the same time.
On that note I just want to say I'm very sorry about all the bugs you may have encountered! I don't really have a good excuse other than to say that the end of Early Access there was maybe 2-3 people playing the game per day and very few people reporting critical bugs. When it goes from that level to nearly a thousand people playing per day it's going to highlight some things I missed myself. I'm disappointed in myself that I let so many go live and I'm hoping to improve my processes so that so many don't slip by in future releases.
I'm going to try and make sure big versions go up on a test branch for at least a week before I release it so that people have time to report bugs to me before I ship it. Hopefully this and more people playing the game will help me catch things earlier.
I've seen a lot of confusion about how weapons work so these two improvements are meant to help weapons be a bit more transparent. Health bars have options if you want to turn them off but at the base level they are will only come on if an enemy actively is taking damage to reduce clutter as much as possible.
I've seen a lot of frustration with the way the current system saves only at the beginning of the system. I've decided to bite the bullet and build out a save system that tries to keep up with the pace of the game. This was pretty difficult to do and may still have some small bugs here and there but I hope I've ironed out most of them. There's a pretty high chance your 1.0.7 version saved run will not work well with the 1.1.0 version so I'd highly advise finishing that run up before updating. I did everything I could think of to make sure it transfers over smoothly but I just want to warn as many people as possible.
Over the course of I added more difficulty levels so I gradually tuned down the base game to be more accessible for those that just want to enjoy the story. Problem was there was a certain play style: basically picking low # of inhabited planets, shielding the first planet immediately and then quickly shielding the second to avoid any attacks and then farming to full before the next system and doing it again. This playstyle side stepped a lot of the "good" parts of the game in my opinion. Additionally it lead to knock on effects where you could go through the entire region without fighting some of the most challenging enemies AND enemies wouldn't scale up very well so they felt very easy as you progressed in the run. Most of the balance changes address this play style in a variety of ways.
Wanted to help players feel like they have a bit more control over their ammo so I made a couple of items and a station that can help "redistribute" ammo you currently aren't using into ammo you can.
I've got some plans for the next update: rework all ship abilities. I really want to add a layer of depth to ship's abilities that currently doesn't exist. These will probably be taking the current ability and adding a way of "charging" the ability through skilled use (i.e. hitting enemies with your drones stacks charges that increase their power in fun ways but the stacks decay over time so you'll need to continually hit to keep up with the decay). I'd love to build in a lot of synergy between these enhanced abilities and upgrades that can be utilized and bring a lot more interesting choices to your builds.
After seeing folks play during the launch I think the base difficulty is, just slightly, too easy. Just to be clear the base game isn't supposed to be brutally punishing, that's what surge difficulties are for. That said I think there's a couple of things allowing first timers to progress a bit too far into the game without hitting much challenge:
I've got some other changes that I'm playing with but I want to continue testing them out a bit more before releasing them. These are just a few quick fixes to bring the difficulty more inline with what I intended.
