Posted November 03, 2020 by Matt Glanville
First up, a reminder: your save data will be reset in this update!
This affects your game settings and any mid-game saves you may have left unfinished. This is due to some major changes which have made the old data obsolete. Apologies for any inconvenience this causes! I'll always avoid resetting save data whenever possible but the nature of Early Access makes it inevitable sometimes.
With that out of the way, here's the the good news...
It's here!
You can now view the the Steam leaderboards in-game! (only if you're running the game through Steam, of course) No more switching out to your web browser to view them on the Steam page.
And, of course, you can see your performance in the Daily Challenge here too.
This update brings big changes to how the game's Trials work. Instead of randomly being dealt one enemy and playing through 3 stages heavily populated by that enemy, the stages you face are now much more shuffled. You may now face any combination of enemies in each trial.
Currently, Snaptors and Kappas will appear in Trial 2. Redhorns and Hatcheries populate Trial 3. Trial 4 is a combination of all the above, plus their savage ball-chasing versions. All 4 trials include mixtures of the basic Mad Lad enemy and sometimes Ticks too.
Of course, this enemy list is only going to get bigger before the game is finished so you'll see much more variety throughout your runs.
This change has no doubt impacted the game's difficulty and it will probably need further balancing. However, I'm making an effort now not to get too bogged down in fine-tuning the smaller details constantly and instead focusing on the bigger stuff that needs to be added. Polish can come later! ๐
Now you can do it! It's limited to once per stage though, so only use it when absolutely necessary.
Several players reported that using a combination of mouse and keyboard to play would cause issues where the cursor would disappear. This has now been addressed. Noice.
I've also added a shortcut button to view information popups for all enemies. These popups show every enemy's health and the order they will perform their next action (vital information in some situations!).
This is particularly useful when using a gamepad as you were previously unable to view information for enemies unless an attack was possible.
This new shortcut is mapped to the "i" key, or R1/Right Bumper on gamepads. Alternatively, just hover your mouse cursor over the new "Enemy Info" icon in the top-right corner of the screen.
They're here too.
Here's the full list of changes in this update...
I hope you enjoy this big update! It's been a lot of work but I'm really happy with the results.
For future updates I'm planning to expand the ways you can level up your players, and having another look at the way the scoring system works.
Now dive into that Daily Challenge and show the world how good you really are!
Matt