Content

Trading Redesign

I’ve reworked trading entirely. There were a couple things that I wasn’t happy with in the previous system:

• It was tedious to check what kind of trades ships had. Typically players want to make one or two specific types of trades and it was more work that it was worth to check each.
• What the player could give was too limited for my liking. It was basically just a credit sink which is a little simplistic. I want there to be some risk/reward decisions coming into play.
• The “instant” feeling of a trade felt unrewarding and a little jarring about what you are actually receiving.

So this is how I’m trying to solve some of those problems:

• Ships more clearly show the type of items they are offering without interacting (Through the color of the crates they are carrying).
• Ships will now trade for your ship’s armor and ammo. So there might be some heavy risk involved with acquiring your favorite weapon in a run or if you are low on armor you may need to sacrifice your ammo to repair your ship.
• The trade ship will drop the crate and the items will pour out of it after a short delay.

Buff stations

Throughout your run you may find stations that can give your ship powerful temporary buffs. Use these wisely as when they are expended they are gone.

Three new upgrades all related to buff stations.

New ship: Star Former

A powerful new ship has joined the roster. This ship can transform for a short time which dramatically boosts your firepower. Be careful though, this transformation does come at a cost to your mobility.

Upgrade/Resource cap changes

Some strategies employed by players have show me that raising the resource cap is one of the most powerful effects in the game, which lead to always picking up the Expand Cargo upgrade. While I want the ability to expand your resource cap to be a point of in-run progression I don’t want it to be a dominate choice when considering other, more fun, upgrade options. So I’ve tied a small resource cap increase to each upgrade you pick up. There’s a bit of choice involved with this though as each time the upgrades appear they will increase one resource cap by 10 or both by 5.

One new weapon: Tonic Screwymabob

UI Tweaks

Better visual indication when you increase your ammo or pick up extra health

Balance Changes

Reload/ammo balance

In the last update I did a significant buff to reloading which I’m partially reverting. What I noticed is that ammo increases no longer had any value, it actually became difficult to run out of ammo which I don’t think is a good thing. I’m addressing this in a few ways:

• Increasing fire rate of high ammo cost weapons so it’s a bit easier to run out of ammo and feel like you’ll be more powerful if you have a higher max ammo.
• Increased the ammo cost of a few powerful weapons with long fire rates which leads to never running out of ammo.
• Reduce reload rate slightly (not all the way to what it was before the buff).
• Most players say running out of ammo is most annoying when mining, which is when I saw most players sitting still to hit asteroids. So I’ve slightly reduced the number of damage needed to “break” an asteroid, this seems to lead to a better flow of shoot > break > move & reload > repeat and rarely running out of ammo during this.

Here’s the specifics:

• Single Laser slightly slower fire rate.
• Dual Laser slightly faster fire rate.
• Wild Cannon slightly faster fire rate.
• Triple Laser faster fire rate.
• Charged Ion Cannon lower charge time and higher damage.
• Homing Missile slightly faster fire rate.
• Chunk Model I slightly faster fire rate.
• Shotgun much faster fire rate.
• Beam Cannon much faster fire rate.
• Death Orb slightly faster fire rate and higher damage.
• Artty Model IX much faster fire rate and increased ammo cost.
• Energy Staff ammo cost and damage increased.
• Energy Sword ammo cost increased.

My hope with these changes is that ammo progression reclaims it’s value (you should feel some motivation to buff your overall ammo and gain upgrades that increase your ammo) while not feeling like a significant nerf to the player’s overall power level.

Burrl changes

With only a couple of upgrades this ship had pretty much uptime 100% invulnerability because of a bug that caused you to get a full post-hit invulnerability time after a shield went down. I’ve fixed that bug and increased the cool down of the shield a bit to see how it plays now. I still want this ship to feel durable but the ease at which you could avoid mechanics was a bit too much compared to other ships.

Game feel tweak

Changed how sharp turning work to make it easier for players to make hard turns without overshooting too much with the turn rate.

Gamepad support

The game should support most controllers now. I’ve added options to switch between controller controls and keyboard/mouse controls in the settings. Need people to try this out as much as possible as I'm very interested in how these controls feel.