Starward Rogue:Early Alpha Release Notes

Version 0.208

(This isn't done yet, we're still working on it.)

• Added a new slider to the graphics tab of the settings window: Zoom
  • If you have a resolution smaller than 1920x1080 you may want to use this to "zoom out" the game area (not the HUD) a bit. Reduces graphical quality somewhat.
  • Default: 1, Max Zoom Out: 0.64
  • Thanks to Bluddy for inspiring this change.

Version 0.207

(Released December 22nd, 2015)

• Fixed a bug where rooms horizontally flipped were actually flipped and then flipped back to normal, but the laser emitters and mysterious pipe openings were only flipped once, resulting in them pointing the wrong way.
  • Thanks to Pepsisolo for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where charge weapons would not fully update when you switched to a different room, causing their charged states to not work.
  • Thanks to Pepsisolo, Misery, and The Hunter for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where picking up a shop item gave you credits rather than took them away.
  • Thanks to Misery for pointing out the unorthodox business model.

• Made more sure that the "things I've picked up this floor/run" lists are cleared between runs, so you don't run into item-room/AP pedestals with nothing on them.
  • Also made it so that if for some reason there really aren't any unlocked items eligible for a pedestal spot (in a shop, for example), it doesn't spawn the pedestal either.
  • Thanks to Pepsisolo and The Hunter for reporting.

• Added new toggle to the New Run screen: Temp Dev Mode
  • If this is checked, this single run will essentially be in "developer mode" which allows various debugging features. Since those features can be used to cheat, you won't gain achievements, permanent Ability Points, or long-term stats in this mode.
  • A big chunk of what this enables is the "L" menu, where pressing L during the game will bring up a window in the upper-left corner with various nefarious buttons.
  • Among them is a new "Unlock All AP Items" button.
  • Thanks to The Hunter for inspiring this change.

• Entities that pass through both wall terrain and non-wall terrain (like Ability Point drops) now also pass through anything else that can block passage.
  • Thanks to The Hunter for inspiring this change.

• Ability Point drops are now immune to gravity/repulsion.
  • Thanks to The Hunter for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug in recent versions where on XBox controllers you could not reassign the left and right triggers in the key bindings.

• The game now uses icons for the gamepad buttons that previously would just show as numbers. This should help with confusion on what each thing is in prompts, etc.

• There are now 360-specific gamepad button images for when players are using that controller.

• Energy no longer regenerates over time during play inside rooms.

• Energy is now fully replenished every time you move between rooms.

Version 0.206

(Released December 21st, 2015)

• Now when you pick up health/missiles/credits/keycards/ability-points it waits part of a second before announcing it, so you get "100x Ability Points" rather than 100 messages in the log.

• Health pickup announcement now puts it in terms of health boxes rather than health points (2 points per box).

• Now when you win a room any mines remaining in it go boom.
  • Thanks to The Hunter for inspiring this change.

• Now when enemies drop items on death, and the point would be inaccessible, the game tries to find a nearby open tile to spawn the item on.
  • Thanks to Cinth for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where the boss health bars were relative to the max health of the current and future forms, rather than including previous forms.

• Fixed a bug where the "do not seed until floor X" and "do not seed on or after floor Y" rules for items, bosses, etc were inverted.

• Player-directed beam weapons are now blocked by walls.
  • Thanks to The Hunter for suggesting.

• Door traversal now happens by moving into the door, not just touching it.
  • Thanks to pumpkin and mooncows for inspiring this change.

• Fixed an issue in the prior version with the wrong version of the player legs not looking right. Wow glitchy!
  • Thanks to Pepisolo and The Hunter for reporting.

• Fixed some bugs with the quick select always using X and B for that regardless of whether or not LB was held down.
  • Thanks to Pepisolo for reporting.

• Previously, all of our pursuer enemies just had a single category: Pursuer_1x1. However, this was not sufficient to handle some of the small pursuers that really require a lot of room for extra kiting. Looking at you, Charger!
  • We've now added a new DeadlyPursuer_1z1 enemy class that is used in fewer rooms and only in appropriate contexts. The Charger now gets seeded there, and future enemies in that general design space will also go there.
  • Thanks to The Hunter, crazyroosterman, and others for reporting.

• The special weapons now have graphics that get swapped in on your mech when you switch between them and the missile launcher.

• The various special weapons all now have at least provisional recoils set on them.

• The three Arc enemies are now Pearl enemies and have actual graphics. This also includes new shot graphics for them.

• The Shifter is now the Chaotic Core instead, and now has real graphics and new shot graphics. It's also now a Chaos_5x5 enemy rather than a Wanderer_3x3, because goodness it does create chaos.

• Two new versions of the Chaotic Core have been added, and they are dastardly indeed. Actually one is a bit easier and the other one is dastardly.

Version 0.205

(Released December 18th, 2015)

• An awesome new version of the loot chest that both looks nicer and is animated has been added to the game.
  • It also now has an unlocking animation, although it does not yet have sound effects during the unlock process (that is planned).

• A new shop room variant has been added that has a chest in it.

• The junk-themed rooms now have some even better updated graphics.

• The game now does a better job of switching out of gamepad mode into keyboard+mouse mode (and thus restoring the mouse cursor to visibility). You no longer have to press a keyboard key for it to happen, but at the same time small jostlings of the mouse should still not cause it to switch.

• Now tiles in non-boss rooms that normally drop loot after you win the room only have a roughly 10% chance of doing so.

• The game now uses recoil on the two visible weapons that you have, and there is no longer kickback on your actual player mech itself anymore. We will likely use kickback on some very large weapons, but not these smaller ones (not even missiles).
  • Thanks to Pepisolo, TheVampire100, and The Hunter for suggesting we remove the kickback.

• Added a new option to the map editor that lets us put in very-broken shootable objects that can take some damage, but only explode the one time. It's the third stage of the regular shootable objects.

• Updated the one big boss room that was exploitable to use the very-broken shootable objects instead of the solid walls.

• Updated all the existing bosses to use a new boss room in a new giant-sized boss room chamber that has almost no cover but a little extra space to the center to give you buffer between entering the room and facing the boss.

• All 3 forms of the Charger enemy have had their speed reduced a bit

• The Shifter and it's core were both mistakenly named "Blue Crystochet", this has been fixed

• The Shifter Core has had it's movement speed reduced, as well as the speed of it's bullets
  • It also no longer spawns on it's own; no more sudden explosive attacks from this crazy thing the moment you enter a room!

• The number of health shards required for a new health box has been increased for normal difficulty and higher.

• The text in the escape menu now talks about the Current Run instead of the Current Campaign, and the formatting is better and now has the amount of time spent in the current run rather than since the entire save slot was started.
  • In here you can also see your stored ability points now for more than one run, and your unlocked item and enemy counts.

• Glass pots now have a 90% chance of dropping something rather than a 40% chance.
  • They also now drop ability points much more commonly than anything else, so that they can drop something low-value (individually-speaking) and not flood the player with health and whatnot.

• The laser sight of the mech is now always visible.
  • Thanks to TheVampire100 for suggesting.

• There is no longer a default keybind for zooming on the gamepad. We want to move away from there being much in the way of zooming anyhow -- the only reason it's there at all is for people with other screen resolutions.

• Fixed some issues with the calculation of the location of the reticule on the mouse controls that were making it bonkers at times.

• Missiles no longer ever slide along walls. However, players can no longer accidentally friendly-fire themselves with missiles, either.

• The range of missiles has been cut from 2000 to 1000.

• Fixed an issue where area of effect shots were playing the on-hit sound twice, and also ignoring the "don't play a sound if no damage was done" rule.

• There is now a slight angling-inward of the systems that you have equipped that points shots more to the center of where your mouse cursor is rather than on parallel tracks beside it. It's not as extreme as the aiming was in prior versions, as the firing angle offset is still fixed. But it makes aiming at a distance more accurate when you're trying to hit a small target.
  • Thanks to mooncows for reporting.

• Fixed several layer-ordering issues that were causing some oddities when on the very far sides of extra-long rooms, among other things.
  • Thanks to The Hunter and Pepisolo for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where rooms with non-symmetrical door locations (NE and SW right now) could wind up with their doors permanently blocked in some cases because of flipped tiles inside the room. Those rooms just no longer flip the tiles.

• Fixed a bug where the game could get very loud with lots of sounds stacking on top of one another.
  • Thanks to The Hunter for reporting.

• Now at the end of a floor, or a run, you get a stats screen.

• Now when the player takes fatal damage, there's a short period where:
  • the player's still there
  • is made invisible
  • emits a normal death explosion (that shattering effect)
  • the simulation slows down to about 20% speed just to make sure you notice that the game has owned you again
  • then you're shown the end-of-run stats
  • Thanks to Cinth and others for inspiring these changes.

• The visual for ability points now uses the blue version of what was previously credits. It was too confusing what credits were in practice while playing, but this animation works great for ability points.

• A new graphic for credits has been implemented, based on the same concept in Bionic Dues. (Hey, why not tie things together.)

• The bottom-left HUD now shows whichever system is active for your special weapon button, and shows what your inactive system is (if there is one).

• There are now sound effects for when you die and for when you fire missiles.

• Lots of new item updates, as with all of our new builds.

• The gating of items behind floors and ability point unlocks is now in place.

Gamepad Updates

• Thanks to the insanity of how unity 3D maps some of the internal stuff for xbox 360 controllers on multiple platforms in particular, we've replumbed all of the axis-based stuff (the analog sticks and d-pad) so that they are checked differently now, and are consistent between platforms. Other types of gamepads will continue to use the regular unity internal stuff, but now the 360 controllers will behave better and have the proper defaults on all OSes.
  • Well, they should. We've not actually tested it yet outside of windows.

• All of the xbox controller settings should now be consistent across platforms for the buttons themselves, too.

• At long last fixed the core issue with the 360 controls (well, aside from the cross-platform stuff): the left and right triggers can now both independently be used. Previously they would cancel one another out.

• The gamepad controls have been revamped once more. There are no longer any functions mapped to the analog stick clicks.
  • The run button is now RB rather than LB.
  • The menu button is now Start, like you'd expect.
  • The use consumable button is now Back, which is inconvenient but the most convenient we could think of for something used that infrequently (relatively speaking).
  • Interact/use is now LB, which is much easier to reach. And it's also easier to use while moving and firing at the same time if need be.
  • Holding down LB now activates the gamepad zoom mode, which we may or may not keep on as a default. But it does seem to work pretty well.
  • Holding down LB now activates a whole new "quick switch" mode for weapons, which causes the X button to switch between your missiles and special weapon, and your B button to cycle your main weapons.
    • This was a big reason that the interact button was made LB instead of RB: LB+X is easy, where RB+X is a contortionist move.

Ability Points

• There's now an "ability points bar" near your minimap.
  • It has four blocks; the bottom fills at 100 points, the next fills when your total is 400, the third when your total is 1200, and the fourth when your total is 2400.

• When you go to the next floor, you gain permanently (stays between runs) any ability points in a full capsule (or in the bottom capsule, if none are full), and lose any excess on top of that.

• If a capsule is full, you cannot lose points below that threshold during the floor.

• Enemies drop ability points when you kill them.
  • They sit and glow for a short time, then hunt you down with unerring accuracy and stuff themselves into your inventory.

• Every second you spend in a room with enemies (i.e. before you win the room) you lose 0.2 AP.
• Every time you get damaged (regardless of how much the damage was for, just more than zero) you lose 10 AP.
• When you die, whatever AP you were carrying (regardless of full/partial capsules) goes to your permanent balance.

• When you go to the next floor, your accuracy during the floor you're leaving gives you bonus AP.

• When you start a new run, if you have enough AP to afford anything, the first starting room will have one or more items to choose from.
  • Some you have to pay a certain amount to unlock, and they will seed normally in the future. You also get a copy for that run.
  • Others you don't have to unlock (because you already did, or because it just doesn't need it) and you can spend AP to buy a copy for that run.
  • Either way the other items available for AP disappear when you buy one.

• In shops you may find Deposit Boxes, which allow you to spend credits to earn permanent AP (that's not subject to how you do the rest of the floor/run).

Version 0.204

(Released December 15th, 2015)

• There was an incident involving a tea cup, a banana, and a sledgehammer. We broke all old saves again.
  • (actually it's because the gun layout on player ships is so different now)

• Substantially improved the effectiveness of the pathfinding used by player-following familiars (the ones that use pathfinding, anyway), and to a lesser degree the enemies that chase the player via pathfinding.

• Now non-boss rooms have a 50% chance of flipping the room population script horizontally, and a further 50% chance of doing so vertically. Relevant laser emitters have their directions reversed.

• Dumbfire weapons are no longer inherently unable to home, since homing range can now be finite.
  • Thanks to Pepisolo for inspiring this change.

• New keybind: Slow Down (defaults to C and Ctrl and left trigger on the 360 controller)
  • Hold down to enter slow-down mode, which lets you move roughly half as fast as normal so you have more precise control to evade bullets.
  • If both it and afterburner are on, slow-down takes precedence on the actual movement speed.
  • Follows to the "make afterburner a toggle" setting, so if that is set Z will toggle slow-down on and off without you having to hold the key.
  • This may be removed if further work on movement and speed makes it less necessary.

• The escape menu lower-right text now lists the power-ups the player has picked up, and the modifiers currently operative on the player.

• To avoid sea-sickness, the momentum logic for the camera now handles small recenterings in a more timely fashion, and avoids swaying back and forth if it doesn't quite fully center.
  • Thanks to nas1m for inspiring this change.

• Fixed several issues preventing gamepad right-stick firing angle from being anything like precise much of the time.
  • This may make it too sensitive, if so you can tone it down a bit by adjusting the axis noise cancelling for Fire Up, Fire Down, etc by going to settings -> controls.

• Arc enemy has been rebalanced and should be less of a complete terror now, though it can tank a bit more damage than before. These changes affect all 3 versions of this enemy.
  • Firing rate has been cut in half
  • Bullet speed has been lowered
  • Movement speed slightly reduced.
  • HP increased by a small amount
  • Size of the initial bullet has been doubled to make it more noticable
  • Thanks to the many people on the forum that pointed out the fact that this enemy was just too irritating to deal with.

• The Charger's third form now moves slightly slower.

• The Shifter Core's bullets now move a little slower, and dont stick around quite as long as before.
  • Thanks to Gemzo for pointing out the tedium of waiting for those shots to go away.

• Now you only have one active "main gun", on the left, and your "special" (i.e. missile) weapon is now on the right rather than the aft-central position it used to be.
  • While firing the main gun, a short line draws from the special to show where it would fire.

• Added new key bind: Switch To Next Main Weapon
  • If you're carrying an alternate main gun, this switches you to it.

• Added new key bind: Switch To Next Special Weapon
  • Switches your special weapon back and forth from your missile system to your energy system.

• Your missiles now fire on the key-bind that fires energy weapons; to switch to having it fire the energy weapon you use the new key bind above.

• Added 2 new high-difficulty enemies, Flak Launcher and Sideshot, both of which are "Fearsome" types and will only appear in certain rooms.
  • These are meant to be late-game only enemies and as such are much more dangerous than most others and are intended to provide quite the challenge.

• Added a couple of new rooms designed for "Fearsome" type enemies, so they have more chances to make an appearance.

• Added a new "sniper" type of enemy, Blaze Cannon

• Added a new boss, Aggressor
  • Right now this one only has one pattern, but will have another one added later
  • This boss is not yet gated by difficulty
  • Does not appear until floor 3 or later

• All of the issues with the analog inputs not being precise are now fixed, finally -- from aiming to moving, including proper dead zones and so on.

• When you are not aiming anywhere in particular while playing with the gamepad, your guns now rotate to face forward.

• Exiting the game by pressing escape on the title screen now has a confirm popup to exit the program, rather than simply exiting the program.
  • Thanks to garpu for inspiring this change.

• The player avatars no longer leave any exhaust -- during afterburner or otherwise.

• After winning 10 runs in a profile, the runs now become 7 floors in length instead of 5.

• The player bullet effects for their main guns are now clearer/better-looking.

• The game now has two new ship categories: FinalBoss and SuperFinalBoss.

• Fixed a bug with do_not_seed_until_x_floors_down, where it was limiting seeding in reverse.

• Added a bunch of new seed-limiting flags for entities that are all focused around stopping seeding things that you used to seed. Detailed here: https://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Starward_Rogue:XML_-_GameEntity_Definitions#Seed-Limiting_Stuff

• Now that the game no longer has such a strong momentum-based feel to it -- since we're now doing mechs and not trying to emulate flight some of the time and SHMUPs the other time -- the SMHUP-mode toggle has been demoted to only appear in the settings menu and not also in the start-new-run menu. The number of people using this should be a much-increased minority now.

• Now that we are a mech instead of a flying ship, afterburners are called "sprint" and "slow down mode" is just called "walk slow."
  • On the keyboard, the default mappings for this are now both Ctrl and C, since those are common for crouch.

• Fixed an issue in previous versions where if you were moving faster than your new top speed (aka sprinting and then no longer sprinting, or moving and then shifting to walk mode), then you would not actually slow down at all!

• The default controls for a lot of the secondary functions, including sprinting and walking slowly, have been rebound.
  • Increased prominence has been given to walking slowly even above sprinting on the gamepad, because the former is more commonly important during battle and thus should be more easily accessible.

• Added new item pickup xml options:
  • frequency_in_item_pools (int, default 100)
    • If this is set to more than 100, then it will show up with greater frequency than it otherwise would -- 200 would mean twice as often as it otherwise would.
    • Similarly, 50 means half as often as usual, and 1 is 1% as often as usual.

• There is now a small chance of finding keycards in the fragile glass shootable objects.

• The shop now actually has room definitions!
  • Note that the shop functionality hasn't been tested lately, though.
  • Also please note that the deposit boxes in these rooms do not yet function.

• Previously there was an invisible "spawns entities that drop a missile if you have no missiles" spawner in certain rooms that had no way to destroy all enemies without using a missile. This was to prevent situations where the player becomes permanently trapped due to lack of missiles.
  • However, this didn't feel right to some players, was confusing to many, and was also exploitable by some. So... yeah. That's gone.
  • Now the rule for proper room design is that bombable blocks can be used to block off rewards that are optional, but not main passages or places where enemies are. Makes sense actually!
  • Thanks to Pepisolo, mooncows, Bluddy, ElOhTeeBee, and dfinlay for reporting.

• The game now has an updated development status.

• The number of player choices has temporarily been reduced to 1, while we're polishing out the mech feel.

• 600 new shot graphics (12 colors each of 50 shapes) have been added to the image folders, although they are still yet to be integrated into the full game proper.

• The new mech designs include a cockpit that changes colors/designs as your health gets lower and your shields are on/off. This central cockpit is also brightly colored and the exact size of your hitbox, which is pretty useful for dodging.
  • Thanks to ElOhTeeBee and mrhanman for inspiring this change.

• Something like 35 new rooms? Ish? A lot, anyway.

Version 0.203

(Released December 6th, 2015)

• Further tightened how close you spawn to the door on the other side, because some rooms have interior walls very close to the door spot that you can otherwise get stuck in.

• Improved the logic for "unstucking" the player from walls.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman for the report and save.

• Made the Tutorials button just pop up a "Not Ready Yet!" message rather than baiting unsuspecting testers into errors of their doom.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman, Cinth, and ElOhTeeBee for being thus baited.

• Now when you enter a room where there's no population scripts defined (Shop rooms, Challenge rooms), the game presents a much nicer-sounding not-implemented-yet messages rather than yelling "Error!" and sending you scurrying off to mantis.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the "Load" button on the Load Bug Report Save screen didn't work, even though double-clicking a save did.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman for finding the bug on the bug report window.

• Added new settings toggle on the Extras tab: Skip Intro
  • If this is on, the game doesn't show the intro when starting a new game.

• Changed floor generation logic for seeding boss rooms to not allow seeding at the "second farthest" available distance-from-starting-room if that distance is less than 2.
  • This should avoid situations where the boss room seeds directly adjacent to the starting room.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting.

• Fixed a couple bugs in the invisible bouncing-mine emitter (which only launches one mine, right at the start of the room) where there was a few seconds delay before it spawned the mine, which could lead to an... unpleasant surprise.

• The screenshot key is no longer considered "any key" for the check on whether to close the title screen or the win-or-loss screen.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for reporting.

• Fixed some bugs where not all of the "draw single screen background image" calls were scaling and centering appropriately.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for reporting.

• Added a new boss, "Labyrinth". This is the first non-standard boss, and comes with it's own unique room. Some different tactics are required to deal with this one.
  • As this boss uses some new ideas and a completely different style from all of the others, consider this one "experimental" for now. As in, not balanced at all.
  • Going along with this, a "buddy" entity for the boss was also added. Four of these will spawn in the room with the boss.

• Mirror has gained additional weaponry and should be a much more formidable opponent.
  • In addition, the nature of the added bullets should prevent exploits from being usable now.
  • It's health in both forms has also been doubled.
  • No longer spawns until floor 4

Version 0.202

(Released December 4th, 2015)

• Enemies can no longer pass through stationary mines.

• Fixed some other bugs that could lead to the player spawning on top of the boss, or otherwise not next to the boss room door.

• Some performance improvements for cases where there are a LOT of bullets flying around (I'm looking at you, Battleswarm).

• Many other internal progress points toward more items, etc.

Version 0.201

(Released December 3rd, 2015)

• The walls and doors have been updated to the newer visual style.

• Fixed an issue where doors were drawing too high in the draw order (a relic from a much older version of the game), thus clipping over the ship.
  • Thanks to Pepisolo and mrhanman for reporting.

• More tuning has been done on the handling for the player ships, to make them control substantially better. Part of that is lowering their speeds a bit to be about halfway between where they were last version and in versions prior to that.
  • Thanks to mooncows for reporting the speed issue.

• Fixed up a number of issues with diagonal walls that had odd visual cutoffs.

• If you get stuck in a wall due to insane speeds it now pushes you out.
  • Thanks to Cinth and mrhanman for reporting.

• The player now has completely unique shots for themselves, so that when you see shots coming off of rebounds or mysterious pipes, etc, you never wonder if they are yours!

• The repulsor and gravity well now have new graphics.

Version 0.200

(Released December 2nd, 2015)

• Melee weapons (e.g. the implicit ones created from hitboxes by the shot_damage_per_second_from_touching flag) on a one-hitbox entity now have their range adjusted by anything that adjusts the size of that hitbox. This should cover all shot cases.

• In a pretty major structural change, we're now reading the metadata from images out of central flat files within their folder than out of the image names themselves. This is needed so that when we do pushes of further versions of the game, we don't wind up with images sitting next to old versions of themselves if we change the metadata.
  • This is rather important for having the ability to push updates of the game that play nice with the version they're updating.

• Ctrl+F6 now also reloads the image metadata regarding animations, making it quicker to tune those as we implement them.

• Fixed bug where the description flag was ignored for all but ships.

• The DamagePerSecond and DamagePerSecond_IfMoving modifiers have been changed to no longer apply per tick but instead literally per second. So as long as the damage is in whole numbers it should be accurate now, rather than applying at least one damage every tick.

• Fixed a bug where the behavior flag wasn't working on familiars (for use with familiar_type="NormalShipBehavior")

• Improved the tracking of SimpleCircleOrbit familiar angle, so that accumulated rounding differences over time didn't put familiars of that type out of sync with each other.

• Removed the randomness of the distance at which SimpleCircleOrbit familiars are put from the parent entity, to make them look more in sync (previously the ones "inside" would revolve faster, naturally).

• New keycard graphics!

• Three new "Arc" enemies have been added, replacing the previous broken "Brick" enemy

• The graphics for health pickups and credits are now animated and completely different (way more thematically appropriate).

• Fixed an issue with the angled floor edges flickering above and below the straight ones in rooms.

• Changed the color of the shop and major item rooms to be greenish instead of blue.

• The game now has the player ships visually over 0.2 seconds when they make a 180 degree turn, and the appropriate percentage of that when they make smaller turns.
  • Most other ships already did an effect of something along these lines, but the player ships were turning instantly, which did feel kind of cheap and odd.
  • The key thing is that this doesn't actually impact your movement, it's just a visual thing. Well, it does impact how quickly your guns swing around, but that's a super subtle piece of information. And it doesn't affect how quickly your ship changes direction, which is the key thing.
  • Thanks to Bluddy for suggesting.

• Some corrections and clarifications to the intro story.

• There is now some simplistic reflection code in place for ships and shots and such as they pass in front of the windows. We'll refine this further in another build.

• New enemy "Shifter" added
  • Though it doesnt seem like much at first, it's a very dangerous enemy. Tip: Clear out everything else in the immediate area before attacking this guy. Be ready to move!
  • There is only one version of this enemy for now. It's possible that one is enough.
  • This enemy will not spawn until at least floor 4

• Shrapnel Rose no longer has any safe-spots
  • Thanks to The Hunter for reporting

• Shrapnel Rose has had the color of the bullets in it's second pattern changed
  • Thanks to Ptarth for suggesting

• New Enemy "Charger" added
  • This enemy puts out beams to all sides, with limited range, and simply chases you. However, it becomes faster and faster as it takes damage.
  • This enemy will not spawn until at least floor 4

• Fixed a bug where losing one hull health would cause it to show 1.5 empty hull health boxes instead of just 0.5.

• Fixed a bug where the escape key didn't work to bring you out of the continue/new-run/etc menu (thus preventing a normal way to exit the game at all) after you lost or won a run.
  • Thanks to mrhanman and Cinth for reporting.

• Made mines not trigger on other enemies, unless that enemy had just been knocked back in the last tenth of a second or so.

• Most AOE shots (notably, player missiles) will no longer chain-explode shots from the same gun fired by the same entity.

• Ships with a Wanderer AI now pre-check their random destinations to make sure they can move at least half a tile along the designated angle before colliding with the terrain.

• Fixed a bug where turning via the gamepad analog stick from SW to NW caused a weird hitch in the turn for about a frame.

• Battleswarm boss now has more HP in both forms

• Crystal Mother boss now has altered patterns depending on the difficulty level, as does Battleswarm
  • The difficulty of the Hard mode patterns for both of these have actually been increased a bit beyond the originals, so these might be tougher than ever

• The "foreshield" enemies are now named more clearly, and no longer use cueing times, and now have a bit of a glow on their rear ends to make that a bit more noticeable.

• Now when seeding a boss/miniboss, the game tries to find a type that has not already been seeded this run. If it fails, it falls back on trying to find a type it's only seeded once this run, and so on.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for suggesting.

• The obstacle line laser emitters now have a cue animation telling you when they're about to resume fire.

• Floors now show scuffs sometimes, and walls now sometimes have some (test, in this case) blinking lights on them. These are mainly test art for us in actually testing out some new engine capabilities that we're integrating.

• When you try to load a savegame and it fails for whatever reason, it now no longer logs the error to the chat log.
  • Instead it prompts you with a more human-readable explanation that there was a problem and asks you to click "Keep" or "Delete", the latter of which will free up the slot for a new save.

• There is now a slight hovering effect on ships, keeping them moving about.
  • Thanks to Bluddy for suggesting.

• There is now a faintly visible forcefield pulsing in the background in all the "window" areas of ships.

• Ships and shots have faint reflections against the forcefield.

• The game has a new icon.

• Now you get a very small "icon box" tooltip-like thing above and to the right of your ship when you:
  • Are over a health, missile, keycard, or credit drop that you cannot pick up because you're full on whatever it is; it shows an icon that you're full.
  • Are over an item pickup that isn't automatically picked up; it shows the key to press to pick it up.
  • Are over a teleport pad; it shows the key to activate it.

• The display of enemy health now uses graphical bars.

• New graphics for player health bar.

• Now when you've "won" a room all enemy systems are considered disabled, so the obstacle lasers will stop firing, etc.
  • Thanks to nas1m for inspiring this change.

• Added new settings toggle: Afterburners Are Toggled Instead Of Held Down
  • When this is on, the afterburner key functions as a toggle instead of something you have to hold down to keep the effect.
  • Thanks to nas1m for suggesting.

• Updated two boss rooms to have slightly more room on the left hand side, thus hopefully avoiding conflicts with players coming into the room there and then spawning inside the boss.
  • Thanks to mooncows, Cinth, and mrhanman for reporting.

• Player familiars with the SimpleCircleOrbit type are now always evenly spaced in a circle around the player.
  • And any beyond 8 go in an outer circle a bit further out.

• Tightened up the door transitions so it doesn't try to put you so far from the door.

• All of the player main guns and the missile now have muzzle flashes.

• The dark knight has been rebalanced some to fire a bit faster but have a lower overall DPS.
  • Thanks to TheVampire100 for suggesting.

• The default player ship now moves 50% faster, which should be pleasing to a lot of folks.

• The hotrod bomber player ship has been removed -- it wasn't unique enough to be worth it for players to have to choose between it and others.

• There is now a momentum-based movement mode by default that gives more of a feeling of flight to the player ships.
  • There is a toggle that lets you easily switch to a more SHMUP-like mode where you're stopping on a dime, too.
  • The actual numbers for acceleration and deceleration are easily editable in the file RuntimeData/Configuration/EntitySystem/CMP_PlayerSystems.xml, so if you don't like how ships feel then you can tweak those numbers and make suggestions on things that you do like. The underlying system here is super flexible.

• The game no longer gives multipliers to health and shields in a generalized sense based on the difficulty level. Instead each player hull now has specialized added health and shields based on the difficulty level that more appropriately mirror what their actual functions are. Previously the easier difficulties could get some absolutely absurd values.

• The game now has slight kickback on the weapons that are being fired, and slight knockback when they hit non-boss enemies. Definitely helps a bit with the feeling of momentum.
  • Note: this doesn't yet apply to special weapons.

• The camera for the game is now momentum-based rather than being harshly clamped to having the player in the center. This gives a definite feeling of better polish to the game, and makes things like kickback not so jarring.

Version 0.137

(Released November 24, 2015)

• All prior savegames are now broken, because we had some substantial things to move around again.

• ALSO!! The in-game updater should not be used to upgrade from a version older than this to this version. You'll get strange errors because of old files. It was easier to just send a completely new build to the alpha players.

• All bosses now emit a massive bullet-clearing shockwave upon either death, or phase change. No more deaths from leftover bullets after a boss goes down!
  • Thanks to mrhanman for reporting.

• "Brick" enemy was unfinished and had been leaving static bullets behind that never vanished; it has been disabled until it is finished
  • Thanks to dfinlay for reporting

• New boss "Shrapnel Rose" added
• New boss "Lady Staccato" added
  • Note: these bosses are not currently calibrated for "normal" difficulty or below. They only show up on floor 4 or more, though.

• A lot of stuff from the sub-tileset has moved into the tileset, for purposes of a bit of new organization.

• The tilesets are now per-floor rather than per-dungeon, and are things that we'll use to indicate depth rather than what sort of ship in general you are in.

• The sub-tilesets are now per-room rather than per-floor, and are things we'll use to indicate room function (thematically speaking) rather than part-of-ship for the entire floor.

• The game now has edges that get drawn where the floors meet up with the windows. These can be ragged or orderly or whatever we need, and they help to make the transitions there feel more intentional as well as making things a little less blocky.

• The game now has shadows! The shadows respond to your movement around the room, making things seem more alive.

• The game now has some new stencil buffer shaders, which it uses in order to do clipping for shadows to draw properly.

• The teleporter pads are now smaller, look nicer, and are animated.

• The standard item pickup plates have been redone in a more cel-shaded style that is better in keeping wiht the main ship art.

• All of the bombable objects have been redone in the more cel-shaded format.
  • The special bombable ones (that have goodies in them) now stand out more)

• New graphics for the floor panels have been introduced.

• The game now has angled half-tile floor tiles that it uses, and edges around those as well, in order to make things look a lot more polished and less tile-bound.

• The game now has a new glass shattering sound effect that it plays when fragile objects break, to make it clearer what they are in an auditory fashion as well as a visual one.

• The game now supports quick reloading of images using Ctrl+F6, which is really useful for purposes of doing image tweaks.

• The game now supports angled walls in long sections that were previously "ribbed"-looking with lots of sharp corners.

• The game now uses an "overhead image" for the walls so that it's not so hugely contrasting with the walls themselves. This makes the overall game feel brighter, and also makes the small sections of wall not feel strange.

• The graphics for all the walls have been redone to no longer mess with perspective in the way that they previously were.

• The battleswarm boss has real graphics now, and proper sizing to it.

• Fixed a bug that was charging you credits for items with a shop cost even outside of the shop.

• The minimap is now drawn a bit larger in both the menu and in the main view, and also now has a black underlay and border that makes it a lot easier to see the minimap against any form of background.

• The difference in color between the visited and unvisited rooms on the minimap is now clearer.

• Going over a teleporter or item pickup now immediately makes it show that tooltip rather than whatever enemy you're shooting or recently shot.

• There is now a visible missile system on player ships. Only one missile is now fired from it, and it comes from this system rather than from the two main player guns. The missile that is fired also now moves faster and does more damage. The targeting lines also now behave more sensibly between the two modes.

• Fixed a bug where things that deal different amounts of damage to players and enemies were using the player-level damage against enemies as well.
  • Thanks to Mission and TheVampire100 for reporting.

• Updated the game so that entities that are set to never take damage no longer play any on-hit sounds when shot.

• The graphics for the Mirror boss have been updated to something nicer-looking and more appropriately threatening.

• Now if the player has any systems that can be toggled off, are not toggled off, and are disabled for some other reason (lack of energy, for example) then they toggle off and will not automatically resume function if the disabling condition ceases. Otherwise we get stuff like energy draining stuff constantly keeping the energy from regenerating and not functioning long enough at a stretch to be useful.

• Added modifier target "OnUse_ParentEntityFutureShots" for entity system modifiers.

• Three new enemies, "Foreshields," have been added. They are the first ones actually in the Attacker_5x5 category.

• Added a trio of new swarm-type enemies. The first one is considered an Attacker_3x3, whereas the other two are considered chaos-adders, because... well, they are. ;)
  • There's a neat Ender's Game style of trick to these particular enemies...

• Three new "flea" enemies, all of which are Attacker_3x3, have been added.

• Two new rooms have been added.

Version 0.136

(Released November 20th, 2015)

• All prior savegames are now broken, because it wasn't worth maintaining them yet and we had some things to remove.

• Inversion of a bool accidentally broke the test chamber and starting new runs in existing saves. Facepalm. Fixed.

• Battleswarm boss temporarily disabled due to high degrees of insanity.

• Test work is being done on interior backgrounds under the rooms. Temp graphics for now, but testing approaches.

• Special door graphics are now included for boss doors, doors to evil chambers, and doors to reward chambers and shops. Definitely makes it a lot easier to know where to go without immediately needing to look to your map!

• The changelog link in the game now actually points to the release notes page (which also now exists).

• All of the enemies that are those that sit still until you approach them now also wake on being shot, since the alternative was not just confusing -- it was actually annoying even if you knew what was happening.

• Secret rooms were not actually secret before, and were not showing the doors that you bust open, etc. Now they are!

• The secret rooms now actually have good stuff in it rather than test stuff.

• All new graphics for the mysterious circuits.

• Mysterious circuits now actually say what they do if you know what they do.
  • Note: some mysterious circuits are already known from the start of a given run.

• Improved the display of mysterious circuits so that you can tell what they are if you don't know what one is (aka, you can tell they are "potions").

• Fixed a bug that was always marking circuits as known to you if you picked them up.

• When you use a consumable item, it now writes what it did into the message log.

• The concept of "interior backgrounds" versus "starfields" has been removed. Now it's all either floor (in the room) or a starfield background, end of story. This will let us focus more energy on the rooms themselves in particular (the starfields already seem pretty great).

• The energy drops have been removed from the game, and energy pickups in general. Energy pickups that were in the map editor are now "random minor items" that might be missiles, health, or more likely a small number of credits.

• Updated the development status note in the game to reflect the latest.

• When you shoot enemies, it show shows the last-shot enemy's health down there at the bottom of the screen in the tooltip area. And their name.

• When you are in a boss room, it now shows the name of the boss and the health down at the bottom of the screen.
  • Later on, this and the enemy thing will show health bars.

• Fixed an issue where mysterious circuits that were not actually assigned to a specific run could still spawn from the item pools containing them.

• VASTLY improved the gamepad movement, thanks to improved deadzone math.
  • There's still a hitch when moving across the West axis, and the aiming reticule movement still leaves a lot to be desired, but none of that is caused by the actual input area of the game now, at least.

• Fixed up all the issues with the walls having bad overlaps in both images and the code.
  • The way that the wall bottoms are shaved off is a bit temp, but it at least prevents the overlap issue.
  • There were a ton of issues in this area, so if you were complaining about overlaps or whatnot before, these should all be gone now. Will be interesting to see how that changes the perception of walls.

• There are now actually some consumables that seed in the freestanding consumable seed spots, and in the after-room reward plates.

• The game now supports having difficulty level restrictions on specific bullets in bullet patterns, which lets us use our variables to have multiple variants of a boss (or regular enemy) pattern with relative ease, all in one file.
  • The first example of this is with Backfire, which now has individual patterns for every difficulty level. Only the one for Normal is what the designer (Misery) actually intended, though, so other difficulty levels should be treated as a bit suspect for the moment.

• Fixed a bug that was making it so that you couldn't go down a floor without having a bunch of errors.
  • And if you tried to back out of the game at this time, it would have some errors that would make it so you couldn't close it, too.

• The three "Persistence" enemies now do less damage, emit fewer shots, have shots that don't last as long, and have less health.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for reporting.

• "Ammo" weapons still use energy, like before, but energy now recharges from 0 energy to 100 over the course of 7 seconds. Or when you change rooms it moves to full.
  • However, energy doesn't recharge for 1 second after you have been firing your energy weapon, so just leaning on your energy weapon is not a great idea.
  • Energy can still be upgraded by some passive ship upgrades, meaning that you can use an energy weapon for more shots before having to let it recharge, etc.
  • We may have a change where we give some combo bonuses between your main and secondary/ammo/energy weapon (let's just call this secondary from now on). But for now not.
  • Also please note that a number of our secondary weapons now need some tuning in light of this change. Aside from in general still needing some work on "feel."

• On ammo weapons, it now shows their DPS as well as their their energy per second.

• There is no longer a dedicated full-screen-map window or button, but rather the map is shown in the normal escape menu now. Additionally, the map is shown in a larger scale (twice as large) when on that screen now.

• A bunch of new powerups have been added to the game.
  • Known issue: descriptions are not being shown for powerups.

• Rather than tapping the main fire button to pick up items and use teleporters now, you press E on the keyboard or you press Start on the 360 controller.
  • The Select button is now what is used for the menu on the 360 controller, since that is less convenient to reach than Start when it comes to quickly picking stuff up.

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