Overview

Welcome to the dawn of a new age! This update brings a whole new realm of possibility into the game, and it is just the beginning. So this is just a small taste of what I am envisioning for the next few movement updates. 

What's the big deal about? The big deal is being able to move in the horizontal axis. That means left and right. WOAAAAHHH!! With that, comes a whole lot of changes to deal with this very new playstyle.

Movement

To start things off, one of the biggest changes to movement has been how floatrons are going to work. They no longer give a burst of thrust when you fire them but give a continuous stream of thrust upwards. The reason for this change was to hopefully give players more control over their island.

moving upwards with continuous thrust

Being able to move left and right means we are going to need a new item to move your island left and right. Introducing drifters. Drifters can fire in both directions, and thus are the only item in the game which has the ability to have 2 key binds attached to them. By default they are assigned to A and D, for left and right movement respectively.

moving around with drifters

Aerodynamics

Yep, that is right. We have aerodynamics in play. All it means is that the shape of your island actually matters now. If you build a streamlined island, it will have a faster top speed. Build a cube, and it will most certainly have a lower top speed. 

a streamlined island vs a bulky one

Collisions

Collision damage is based on the momentum of both your island and the island you are colliding with. For those of you who haven't yet gotten to high school physics yet, momentum is simply mass x velocity. In other words, the faster you go and the heavier you are, the more damage you will deal.

boink

Blocks also have a new stat called durability. Durability also determines how much collision damage that block will take. The higher the durability, the less damage the block will take. Sand for instance, has a durability of 0%, which means it will take the full damage of collisions.

stone only takes 3 damage while the cloud takes the full 7 damage

Now what if we could weaponize collisions? I decided to do just that. Introducing spykes. These pointy items add damage whenever you collide with another island and have no cooldowns. So provided you have enough thrust to keep ramming and enough health to go all suicidal, ramming is actually a pretty decent strategy!

pointy end faces the direction you are moving in

Weapons

You may have noticed it already, but the game would be pretty hard if you could only fire horizontally. I tried a few different methods over the course of development, and I found that the best way would be to have most weapons rotate to face your mouse. They don't rotate very quickly, so watch where your weapons are aiming before firing. Certain weapons, like beam and artillery weapons, would be too overpowered with this new tech, so they will not aim to face your mouse.

target locked

Weapon groups have also received an overhaul. All groups are now displayed at the bottom. Here is a quick rundown of how they work now:

• Left click each group to toggle selection. Selected groups are expanded and every weapon inside is visible
• Right click each group to toggle it's autofire.
• Left clicking while aiming will fire all selected groups.
• Right clicking while aiming will fire all available weapons, regardless of their group.
• Space will fire all floatrons (not drifters), regardless of their group.

pew pew

Enemies

With all these changes to movement, there are also major changes to enemies, the most notable being enemy classes. To start, we have 9 classes with different specialties, strengths and weaknesses.

Fighter

A small island armed with quite a number of weapons.

Interceptor

A small but fast island that likes to harass with the few weapons it has.

Bomber

A tanky island with only vertical firepower. 

Trireme

A very fast island designed to get up close and personal.

Frigate

An incredibly tanky and slow island which will try to sustain through fights while poking you to death.

Assassin

An squshy island with firepower as large as its range.

Cruiser

A fast and hard hitting island that blitzes its way to victory.

Destroyer

A well rounded purpose island, usually with quite a bit of health.

Dreadnought

The terror of the sky and incredibly prepared to put an end to that smile on your face. Only appears for realm bosses.

Halloween

Yes, by the time this update comes out, halloween will be over. HOWEVER, it has been 7 weeks since the last update and I have been planning something for halloween since then, I juts haven't had an update to go along with it. So here we go! Much thanks to the people over in discord for helping out with the redrawn title as well as some of the items!

All the other changes

There were plenty more changes I made, and probably plenty more that I have forgotten about (sorry, I'm still trying to get better at change logging) so here they are in a nice big juicy list.

• Shield opacity reduced
• Laser trigger is an actual raycasted beam
• Servo motors introduced to increase rotation speed by 30 degrees per second
• You no longer lose if you don't have enough weapons since you can ram
• Missiles have more waviness
• Weapons have different ranges
• Added a bush as a small building. Currently dressing up for halloween as a jack-o-lantern.
• Grouped stats together for better legibility
• Added the ability to change attachment key binds from a the tech toolbar
• Increased propulsors thrust multiplier by 100%
• Clicking on news text or version number takes you to the devlog instead of the game page
• Fixed all the forging bugs (I hope)
• Tab no longer flips weapons
• Warp core base dodge and crit chance increased to 15% and 50% respectively
• Weapons reduce more crit chance
• Weapons reduce dodge chance
• Floatrons and drifters give more dodge chance
• Beam gun has only 2 tech slots to be on par with all the other legendary weapons
• Fixed a bug where continuing a game from the shop would break the shop

Final Remarks

Thank you all for you awesome support of this game and you incredible patience. Sorry that this update took 7 weeks, it was far longer than I had originally intended. Hopefully that the main base for movement is down I can focus on expanding this and exploring all the different possibilities where this could go, like fighting more than one enemy at a time, or looting floating chunks of earth.

I am looking forward to see what height this game can go to. Of course, I wouldn't be able to get this far and I certainly wouldn't be able to go much farther without a really supportive community! If you want to be apart of that amazing community, Join the Discord here!

Much thanks specifically to ψΞββgΛMΣΓS for making the halloween title and C!RÅMØR for making the jack-o-lantern sprites.

Enjoy the game and have fun!