Rogue Wave, our FPS Roguelike Wave Shooter is still in alpha, but making excellent progress. This release has a ton of updates including our first upgrade of the visuals. It’s still all placeholder art, but it’s closer to concept than greybox at this point. The structure of the demo is now in place, with a start, middle and end (my high school English teacher will be proud). Of course there’s a ton of gameplay improvements too. Give it a try and let us know what you think - help us make the best game we can. Remember all the code, except the Neo FPS asset, is open source patches welcome ;-)

Here’s the major changes in this version:

Game Play

• Completion - Level 7 now contains the overall goal, thus the full demo loop is now complete (though we still have no Boss)
• Infinite level - Level 8 is now an optional infinite level
• Added Synthos - a humanoid manifestation of the Nanobots that will play host to passive upgrades
• Crystals - replace crates with minable crystals
• Progression and Difficulty Curves - many of the progression and difficulty settings in the editor are now curves to allow a more engaging experience

Upgrade System

• Destructor Beam - new passive weapon for Synthos
• Body Armour Small - cheaper but less protection

Enemies

• Stingers - fast moving and annoying, but not too dangerous. Spawned whenever a spawner shield is attacked
• AI - general squad improvements along with few navigation mistakes

Player Experience

• Procedural buildings - all buildings now procedurally generated for variety
• Story - added backstory to loading screens (doubles as a form of tutorial)
• Shotgun - added boom
• UI - placeholder art and custom font in the UI
• Playable levels - removed possibility (we hope) of a level being generated which was impossible to complete
• Stats screen - provide a stats screen upon death or completion allowing players to compete against themselves
• Feedback - improved player feedback on receiving damage
• Passive Pulse - upgraded the visuals for the Passive Pulse weapon, though still placeholder
• Icons - all achievements now have an icon
• HUD simplification - removed the health tracker from the HUD, Synthos now indicates player health
• Game Balance = many tweaks to upgrade frequency, difficulty, enemy strength and more

Engine and Tooling

• Shaders - custom shaders added to all buildings, still placeholder art, but much better
• Entity system - very basic entity tracking system to allow all systems to use a single query for environment awareness
• FPS Counter - developer builds now display an FPS counter and player logs report FPS data
• Voice lines - fully automated the creation of voice lines within the editor
• Recipe - in editor tooling for managing and balancing upgrade recipes