Starward Rogue:Early Alpha Release Notes

Version 0.136

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

• 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.

Starward Rogue Main Page