Starward Rogue:Early Alpha Release Notes

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Version 0.204

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

  • 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 Z; no default gamepad binding but you can set one if you like)
    • 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.

Version 0.203

(Released December 7th, 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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