Power of Ten launch!


It's finally here! After a little over three years my wee game is fully released!

Here's what's been changed or added:

Intro Story

I am really excited for you all to experience this. To be honest when I started this whole project I didn't have a story in mind at all but I'm proud I was able to craft something that feels this grounded and solid. The introduction is a bit of a different approach to story telling than typical cinematic openings so I hope you find it enjoyable and immersive.

The Tenth Playable Ship

I'm calling this the 4-1 ship and it may be my favorite design. It's incredibly versatile but still tricky to get full value out of so I'm very excited to see how you all use it. You'll be able to find this ship in the last region of the game and each other ship will "shift" down a region from their current unlock area.

Game Mechanic Updates

Progression upgrades

I'm pretty happy with how the Surge system brings a lot of optional difficulty to the game but I'm still a bit disappointed about the completion rate of the base game. So I'm adding some statistical progression to the base game. Just a wee bit! As you play and level your progression score you'll unlock various power upgrades to all ships. There's a handful of these and they are relatively minor each but add up to a significant power jump if you obtain them all. They are all obtained relatively early on in the progression levels and I've significantly reduced how much each level takes to progress with these additional levels. My hope is this helps players who are struggling grind through a bit more and are eventually able to complete the game without too much tampering with the balance of Surge levels.

Upgrade Rerolls

Not hitting a few key upgrades can really make a run flounder. I want to give players a bit more agency over this so I've added an option to reroll upgrades (if you have the credits for it!). This should make it much easier to nab that favorite upgrade that just makes your build sing.

Gear Container Rerolls

It felt like "optimal" play to only reroll the lowest tier containers, because there's a chance to downgrade if they are higher. This feels a bit limiting as far as choices go. It already costs a fair amount to reroll containers so having a double penalty just feels really bad. So I got rid of it! Rerolling will either do nothing or upgrade and occasionally it will double upgrade! The upgrade that removed the downgrade make it have better odds at upgrading. Hopefully this will be more fun all around and give a lot more strategic choices to gear containers.

New Content

  • 4 new upgrades + 1 new starter upgrade
  • 4 new weapons
  • New system augment.
  • 2 more surge levels (10 total now)
  • 1 new consumable item
  • Three new localisations: Turkish, Hungarian and Polish

Quality of Life Improvements

  • Added a few tip screens for some less intuitive mechanics.
  • Loadout will display on pause during a run.
  • Interface/display size toggling without exiting the game
  • Cloud saves enabled cross browser.
  • Fire asteroids are outlined in red making them much easier to see and avoid.
  • Added another larger level to UI scaling for those of you with tiny pixels ;).
  • System select will show how augments effect civilian counts.

Balance changes

  • - Systems with "Hazard Detected" have significantly less hazards that spawn.
  • - Lots of small tweaks to various weapons to make some less powerful weapons stronger.
  • - Starformer's ability has been tweaked slightly. Less missiles will fire but it'll slash swords at frequent intervals around it.
  • - Shield breaker ships will spawn more consistently in surge level 3. You should have one spawn roughly every 4 waves rather than a completely random chance for every wave.

A few changes focused on adding some more functionality to a few under powered upgrades.

  • Long range scanner: added ability to see enemy traps in the system
  • Fire/acid immunity upgrades: both will increase the amount of damage fire or acid do while making your ship immune to their respective element.
  • Several starter upgrades increased in power level (I want these to still be "build around" upgrades but they were starting to be a little weak in comparison to others).
  • Upgrades that drop pickups will spit them further if you are going faster so you don't have to back track to pick them up.

In later regions it's pretty easy to stagnate with resources if you get an unlucky roll on the ratio of uninhabited to inhabited. These changes should make that scenario far less likely as it'll be easier to find sources.

  • Uninhabited planets have a higher floor of possible asteroids that circle them and will gain more asteroids on average as you move through regions.
  • Asteroid resource rewards will increase slightly as you move through the regions.

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed an issue where having two controller/devices hooked up would cause the controls to not function.
  • Fixed an issue where system civilian count wouldn't display properly on system select.

Files

Power of Ten - v1.0.1 (Windows) 112 MB
Jan 11, 2023
Power of Ten - v1.0.1 (Mac) 124 MB
Jan 10, 2023

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