Starward Rogue:Early Alpha Release Notes

Version 0.137

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

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

• 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" added
• New boss "Staccato" added
  • Note: these bosses are not currently calibrated for "normal" difficulty or below

• 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.

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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