Note: v3.02 is a quick hot fix for v3.01 that had a major and easily reproducible crash while editing. Terribly sorry for that bug.

Overview

Lots and lots of small changes eventually pile up into an avalanche of changes really fast. While there weren't a whole ton of significant changes made, there were a lot of little tweaks here and there that make the game feel a whole lot better.

Christmas

The most obvious change is the Christmas event! 

let it snow

We have snow particles, snowmen, even a special and unique event based snow that covers the topmost block of your island! I won't spoil all the rest of the fancy changes I made, but here are some of the more general event changes:

Time based events

Prior to this update, events have been hardcoded and specific to the version they were played on (eg. halloween update). Now, I have developed a cool system that changes the event based on the time of the year! So for the entire months of December and January you can enjoy the cool look of the Christmas update.

Movement

There were a whole lot of small movement changes ranging from speeds, collisions, and knockback.

Terminal Velocity

Terminal velocity was an interesting experiment to see if I could somehow join the horizontal and vertical max speeds together. The major problem with this was that the shape of your island used to determine your maximum speeds respectively and by merging these two together, it created a harmful effect of almost entirely negating the shape of your island. Therefore, this has been reverted back to the old horizontal and vertical maximum speeds and terminal velocity has been removed.

Speed and Acceleration

Both the maximum speed and accelerations have been balanced. In general, it should feel a little bit slower than the previous version, but not too slow. Acceleration has also been increased a tad bit.

Gravity

Islands felt were a little bit light, and so the acceleration due to gravity has now doubled to 45m/s/s. While this may seem like a lot, the increase in speed and acceleration should make it feel pretty good as well.

Collisions

Honestly, there have been so many changes to collisions in the test versions, I wouldn't know if there is more or less collision knockback. Butin general, collisions now behave a lot more as expected and I have tried to make ramming enemies an actually viable strategy. Coupled with the acceleration increase you should be able to use ramming more practically to maybe finish some enemies off.

In addition, collisions should feel less bouncy at higher momentums, meaning that if done right you can actually go through enemy islands and take out a good chunk. Watch out though, these changes are also a significant buff to triremes, so beware of their deadly attacks.

Knockback and Recoil

These numbers have also been played around with a lot. The biggest change is that recoil now shows you the total recoil the weapon will provide across all its shots and volleys.

Updraft and Downdraft

Danger zones now have updraft and downdraft. These powerful wind drafts will lift you up if you fall too low, or push you down if you soar too high. In addition, damage from the danger zones has been significantly decreased to be less punishing. They also will not destroy your blocks but will take them to 1 health.

downdraft in effect in a high altitude danger zone

Relative Projectile Velocity

Projectiles felt too much affected by your movement. So now instead of your full movement speed being applied to your projectiles, only half of it is. This should provide more accuracy and less funny looking shots. Does it defy physics? Probably. But real world physics ain't fun.

Not Enough Thrust

In the previous update, you would only lose the battle if you had no floatrons left. This hurt the AI's feelings a lot, since most of the time they would just slowly fall to their death and look really dumb while doing to. Therefore, this change has been reverted back, so if you do not have enough thrust to keep you in the air, you will lose (same goes for enemies). This also means that targeting enemies' floatrons is an effective strategy once again, since most of the time you won't have to remove them all in order to obtain beat them.

Cool Changes

There were a whole lot of other small changes that I made. Some quality of life changes like the movement ones, just in a whole lot of different areas.

Optimizations

Not a word I throw around a lot, but yes. I have done some majorly significant optimizations to the battle. There should be a whole lot less lag in general, especially noticeable on lower end computers(like mine)

Enemy Indicator

The old enemy indicator was rather buggy. Its location on the edges of your screen were not always correct and pointing in the right direction.

Damage Indicators

But there was nothing wrong with the old damage indicators!!! Yeah, but I like these ones a whole lot more. After a block receives damage, it will start to flash red. The faster and more intense the flashing, the more damage it has taken. Also, the damage image now goes outwards from the corners in both directions and are thicker as well. After 3 seconds of flashing, the indicators will fade into the background. The more damage the block has received, the less it will fade. 

Hopefully, the flashing red will alert you better to which blocks are lower health so you can take out low enemy blocks and protect your own better.

Energy Warnings

Simple addition, but you will now receive non critical warnings if your island uses more energy than it can store or if your energy generation might be a little low. Hopefully this also helps new players to realize that some weapons require energy.

Shields in Shop

Shields are a vital part to the game and so as a result, every shop will contain at least one shield. Just for those of you who didn't know, this adds onto the mandatory stock of one good block, a weapon, a module, a tech and a floatron. Hopefully with this knowledge you can slightly reduce the RNG you encounter in a run.

Additions

In our discord server, we recently hosted a block submission event. In this event, anybody could submit any block idea, with or without a supporting image, in order for a chance to have them in the game. The winning mechanic had three separate people come up with the same thing. That mechanic is:

Healing

Yep, thats right. Healing blocks are now in the game! These blocks slowly regenerate themselves over time and can be a major setback if not taken care of quickly.

  Leaves (rare)

  Evergrowth (legendary)

The third block is a rainbow block, but due to the nature of its mechanics, will not be added to the game this time around.

Thanks to the winners punchinglikes, Meep of Faith and Warmed for submitting these cool block ideas! The evergrowth block also won fist for the best block art and was drawn by Warmed!

Now I just want to take a moment and shout out to the discord server, where you can literally request and suggest your very own items into the game. 

Balances

So many balances to so many things. Let's get started.

• Laser trigger can no longer go on artillery weapons
• Spykes now add 10/20/30% durability to the block they are on 
• Armor now adds durability 5/7/10% to the block they are on
• Blocks now have a maximum durability of 95%
• Spykes health increased from 10/20/30 to 15/30/45
• Increased the range of the mortar and dual mortar
• Decreased the range of the grenador relative to the other artillery weapons
• Added a deviation to missile weapons so they don't all hit the same block
• Increased the hit box of the flare weapons
• Primary crystal shards no longer shatter when hitting a block
• Primary crustal shard damage decreased to the damage of a secondary shard
• Secondary crystal shards have less spread
• Crystal and missile weapons spread are now affected by barrel chokes
• Ion weapons speed decreased and spread increased
• Super enemies are now a little harder
• Bosses have slightly less health and weapons
• Decreased the vertical range of enemies
• You can only pause the game mid battle now
• Damage numbers are slightly more visible
• Tweaked a ton of weapon sprites to match the same color pallate
• Changed autofire tips
• Added a small watermark with the version number
• Added a maximum screenshake amount

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where arcnite was generating energy 60x faster than intended
• Fixed a dual plasma description grammar error
• Fixed an animation bug to do with the trash
• Fixed a bug where you wouldn't lose a life if you quit the game after the defeat screen
• Fixed a bug where collisions were actually adding more vertical knockback than required
• Fixed a lot of background sound bugs
• Fixed a crash that would happen if you went past realm 8
• Fixed a bug that allowed you to go past realm 8
• Fixed a bug where you could edit your island right before a battle
• Fixed a bug where darkstone was not affecting critical chance
• Fixed developer features

Final Remarks

With v3.01 comes an end to the major changes to movement. Yes, there will be a few more movement specific updates coming with some more interesting changes, but for now, I think the movement is in an enjoyable place. 

With the end of this chapter comes the beginning of a totally new chapter. Over the Christmas, I'm going to take a small break from the game development and work a little on my discord server bot. The next update for the game is gonna be pretty major and game changing as well, and the idea is still in progress, so do join the discord server to be involved with the next big thing (trust me, its gonna be awesome). It is also going to take some time, since I can already see a lot of core internal changes (hint: inventory system).

That's all for now! Take care, have a wonderful Christmas, and Happy Holidays!