Version 1.5 - Anniversary Update

Breaking Survivors is now 1 year old! Or well in 3 days to be precise, but I chose to roll the update early as the game was going on sale with the Autumn Sale today.

Anyway, the 1-year anniversary is here and with it come a rework of the Freeze Line artifact, improvements to the leaderboards with support for switching it to Friends only, a setting to freely pick your starting artifact (through rerolls) and some other minor improvements as well as a couple bug fixes.

Also, the game is going to be on sale at -40% for the next 14 days, first as part of the Autumn seasonal sale (on both Itch & Steam) and then as part of the Bullet Heaven Fest 2.0 (on Steam only).

Changelog

Rework - Freeze Line Artifact

• Freeze Line’s freeze duration can’t be upgraded anymore.
• Freeze Line’s Tier 2 and Tier 3 now add extra freeze lines above the initial one.
• This is a big buff of the artifact overall, going from a 2.5/3.75/5s freeze used in a single go to a total of 2.5/5/7.5s freeze but in 1/2/3 go.
• You can find a bit more details on the thoughts behind this rework at the bottom of this post.
• Used Freeze Lines are now greyed out rather than disappearing until the next wave.

New Feature (Steam Only) - Friends Leaderboards

• Steam leaderboards can now be filtered to show only your friends.
• You can switch between Online, Friends & Personal leaderboards at any moment through the Settings menu. This will change the leaderboards displayed in the Leaderboards menu and on the Game Over screen.

New Feature - Starting Artifact Rerolls

• Added a Setting to be able to Reroll freely your starting artifact in runs.
• Starting Artifact Rerolls setting is off by default.
• This doesn’t change anything balance wise and is more of a quality of life feature if you want to start with a specific artifact, as you could just go back to the menu and relaunch the run until you’d get the right one.

Other Stuff

• The Stats UI was completed with Health per Heart, Health Drops, Health To Shield, Base Shield, XP Duplicaion, XP Magnet Range & Danger Zone Slow. All of these except Health per Heart are only shown once you pick the related artifacts.
• Triggering a Freeze while another Freeze is ongoing will now add to the current freeze duration rather than overriding it. This can pretty much only happen if you level up and use the freeze powerup while the bricks are already frozen through Freeze Line.
• Non-Steam Leaderboards now support up to 8 Characters for Name instead of only 5.
• Non-Steam Leaderboards now remember your name in-between game sessions (on windows/linux only, nothing is saved on the WebGL demo).
• Name/Score Submit screen was remade to fit the longer name.
• Lowered the volume of Menu SFXs slightly.
• Wave Start/End announcements now adapt to Danger Zone, Freeze Lines & Lower Limit to avoid any overlap between them.
• Slight improvements to the Pause & Game Over menu.
• Made the background of the Game Over screen leaderboards slightly more opaque to improve readability.
• Fixed 4+ digits ranks overflowing in the Leaderboards.
• Fixed the Upgrades Roll animation glitching upon rerolling before it was finished.
• Removed a couple unused Unity packages from the build, leading to a ~0.5MB file size improvement.

Couple thoughts on the game’s balance / Idea behind the freeze line rework
One thing I’ve tried when designing Breaking Survivors was to have all balls and artifacts viable to some extent, allowing for a good variety of viable builds. And this was mostly a success, as if you check the builds in the leaderboards’ top 100, you’ll be able to see pretty much all balls and artifacts used in those runs.

Sure, overall there are some that are either more or less common, as it’s impossible to have a perfect balance, but there are still a couple major outliers. Two (more precisely three) artifacts in particular are rather big outliers. On one side there was the Freeze Limit which is never used (iirc used only once among the top 100 of both Normal & Quick mode rankings). On the other side its alternative, the Danger Zone which is used in pretty much every single top run due to its strong synergy with Lower Limit.

Ideally, the Danger Zone + Lower Limit could use a nerf as it’s clearly too strong while the Freeze Line ain’t a bad artifact by itself. But a nerf would mean a reset of the leaderboard to avoid the current top scores might end up unreachable, and that’s something I definitely wanted to avoid. Which meant the solution was to buff the Freeze Line so it’d be more of a viable alternative to the Danger Zone + Lower Limit combo allowing for new builds around it.

Also, if we look at the balls’ stats in the leaderboards. Right now, the least used ball is by far the Boomerang ball (only ~4% of runs), as it tends to shine best when bricks are high and so synergizes well with Freeze Line and not at all with Danger Zone. Most used ball is the Phantom Ball, which works best when bricks are low and so with Danger Zone. So, the freeze line rework should also make Boomerang a more interesting option in builds and allow for more builds not relying on Phantom.