It's been an intense 2 weeks for us. Lots of work on the content we want to add. Some small changes to the demo. Lots of work involving testing engines and workflows.
In this update6
Full notes
Full Angelstruck update
Read the full published notes in a cleaner layout. The original post stays linked below.
What changed
2 fixes8 additions5 changes0 removals
Gameplay
UI and audio
Balance
Fixes
addedIt's been an intense 2 weeks for us. Lots of work on the content we want to add. Some small changes to the demo. Lots of work involving testing engines and workflows. Here's the details:
addedMAKING RELOADING AND SOME ENEMY ATTACKS CLEARERWe made many small changes to the reload bar both on the player and the crosshair to make them more legible. First, they're bigger. The reload bar has been redrawn to fit its new size, though it's hardly noticeable unless you obsessively compare it with gameplay videos that have been released. Second, the crosshair and cursor both have shadows now to prevent them to mix with background elements. A non-small amount of you guys have missed the reload indication on the crosshair for all of these reasons. Active reloading should be much more pleasant to perform now. We also added an attack indicator in the form of a line to our sword enemy. This should prevent some annoying instadeaths.
addedLOCALISATION STUFFOur wonderful Japanese translator advised us to use better fonts for Japanese characters, and even recommended a couple. This prompted us to look for suitably elegant but still hopefully legible fonts for our other non-latin alphabet using languages as well. Our Japanese and Chinese players may notice some issues with inaccurate line breaking here and there. This is an issue we're still looking into to solve without the need to just manually add line breaks everywhere. HOWEVER, the text is hopefully much easier to read now! No more tall lines that shrink text to oblivion.
addedNEW DEMO PROGRESSIONIn preparation for Steam's SHMUPFest, and taking in people's impressions, we've updated the enemy progression of the demo. We've added 2 new enemies and shortened the overall play duration to tighten things up. Lots of little tweaks to enemy stats. This should give a better idea of how the final game progression will be.
changedFUTURE PLANS RELATED TO ENGINEWe previously announced our willingness to switch engines to avoid financial risks for the future. We did a ton of work seeing what's possible and efficient in Godot, the engine that's been shining along with Unreal Engine these last couple of weeks. To make it short: we decided that it makes more sense to complete the work we started in Unity. Now that we had plenty of opportunities to test workflows especially for the visuals and UI, transferring the game to Godot will take an unforeseen amount of time that may be detrimental to us.
changedFUTURE PLANS RELATED TO ENGINEWe want to be efficient and not take too much time to deliver a complete product. Not to mention, for all its faults, Unity has immensely powerful particle, UI, sprite setup, animation and tweening systems that we use to their maximum extent. Godot simply doesn't have the benefit of time that Unity had to build all these powerful tools. It is possible that in time, the engine will get more robust especially now that a wave of developers may want to introduce all the things that make 2d development so powerful in Unity. But right now, we don't want to waste time fumbling around when we just released a demo.
Angelstruck changes
addedIt's been an intense 2 weeks for us. Lots of work on the content we want to add. Some small changes to the demo. Lots of work involving testing engines and workflows. Here's the details:
addedWe made many small changes to the reload bar both on the player and the crosshair to make them more legible. First, they're bigger. The reload bar has been redrawn to fit its new size, though it's hardly noticeable unless you obsessively compare it with gameplay videos that have been released. Second, the crosshair and cursor both have shadows now to prevent them to mix with background elements. A non-small amount of you guys have missed the reload indication on the crosshair for all of these reasons. Active reloading should be much more pleasant to perform now. We also added an attack indicator in the form of a line to our sword enemy. This should prevent some annoying instadeaths.
addedOur wonderful Japanese translator advised us to use better fonts for Japanese characters, and even recommended a couple. This prompted us to look for suitably elegant but still hopefully legible fonts for our other non-latin alphabet using languages as well. Our Japanese and Chinese players may notice some issues with inaccurate line breaking here and there. This is an issue we're still looking into to solve without the need to just manually add line breaks everywhere. HOWEVER, the text is hopefully much easier to read now! No more tall lines that shrink text to oblivion.
addedIn preparation for Steam's SHMUPFest, and taking in people's impressions, we've updated the enemy progression of the demo. We've added 2 new enemies and shortened the overall play duration to tighten things up. Lots of little tweaks to enemy stats. This should give a better idea of how the final game progression will be.
changedWe previously announced our willingness to switch engines to avoid financial risks for the future. We did a ton of work seeing what's possible and efficient in Godot, the engine that's been shining along with Unreal Engine these last couple of weeks. To make it short: we decided that it makes more sense to complete the work we started in Unity. Now that we had plenty of opportunities to test workflows especially for the visuals and UI, transferring the game to Godot will take an unforeseen amount of time that may be detrimental to us.
It's been an intense 2 weeks for us. Lots of work on the content we want to add. Some small changes to the demo. Lots of work involving testing engines and workflows. Here's the details:
MAKING RELOADING AND SOME ENEMY ATTACKS CLEARER
We made many small changes to the reload bar both on the player and the crosshair to make them more legible. First, they're bigger. The reload bar has been redrawn to fit its new size, though it's hardly noticeable unless you obsessively compare it with gameplay videos that have been released. Second, the crosshair and cursor both have shadows now to prevent them to mix with background elements. A non-small amount of you guys have missed the reload indication on the crosshair for all of these reasons. Active reloading should be much more pleasant to perform now. We also added an attack indicator in the form of a line to our sword enemy. This should prevent some annoying instadeaths.
LOCALISATION STUFF
Our wonderful Japanese translator advised us to use better fonts for Japanese characters, and even recommended a couple. This prompted us to look for suitably elegant but still hopefully legible fonts for our other non-latin alphabet using languages as well. Our Japanese and Chinese players may notice some issues with inaccurate line breaking here and there. This is an issue we're still looking into to solve without the need to just manually add line breaks everywhere. HOWEVER, the text is hopefully much easier to read now! No more tall lines that shrink text to oblivion.
NEW DEMO PROGRESSION
In preparation for Steam's SHMUPFest, and taking in people's impressions, we've updated the enemy progression of the demo. We've added 2 new enemies and shortened the overall play duration to tighten things up. Lots of little tweaks to enemy stats. This should give a better idea of how the final game progression will be.
FUTURE PLANS RELATED TO ENGINE
We previously announced our willingness to switch engines to avoid financial risks for the future. We did a ton of work seeing what's possible and efficient in Godot, the engine that's been shining along with Unreal Engine these last couple of weeks. To make it short: we decided that it makes more sense to complete the work we started in Unity. Now that we had plenty of opportunities to test workflows especially for the visuals and UI, transferring the game to Godot will take an unforeseen amount of time that may be detrimental to us.
We want to be efficient and not take too much time to deliver a complete product. Not to mention, for all its faults, Unity has immensely powerful particle, UI, sprite setup, animation and tweening systems that we use to their maximum extent. Godot simply doesn't have the benefit of time that Unity had to build all these powerful tools. It is possible that in time, the engine will get more robust especially now that a wave of developers may want to introduce all the things that make 2d development so powerful in Unity. But right now, we don't want to waste time fumbling around when we just released a demo.
Because of that, we decided to just stick with the plan we made for ourselves right after we had first released the demo. This, of course, doesn't change anything for you guys. One way or another, we're still gonna deliver a full game that we hope you'll enjoy blasting through.
CHANGELOG
Updated crosshair and reload bar
Updated reload tutorial visual
Added attack indicator to sword enemy
Added custom fonts for non-latin alphabet languages
Minor enemy stat tweaks
New enemy types and progression
Added credits to main menu
BUGFIXES
Localised codex text updates correctly
Fixed some sprite ordering issues
Button titles in Settings screen are visible now
Fixed surface to space scene transition visual bug
