Catharage Release Devlog

in this Devlog I will cover what's been happening in November and talk in depth about the upcoming release version of the game. I've spent the last month making the remaining content, fixing bugs and finalizing Catharage for release. For about two weeks now, a public playtest has been running where interested players could preview the (almost) final version before and until it comes out. This has been very helpful in gathering more needed feedback and discovering bugs and issues to fix. I want to specifically shout out the Discord members, who've been instrumental in making this playtest a success and have provided fantastic suggestions as well as found many a bug I'd missed.

Release Content

The full version features the following new content:

Three new NPC factions have been added. This includes 18 new playable ships, over two dozen new enemy types, new upgrades bringing the total up to 20 and new objectives and mechanics:

• The Verdant Swarm is a drone-focused faction with many enemies fielding their own little fleets as well as some new support ships, including an AoE healer unit. Their playable ships tend to have more drone slots in places other factions don't. Similarly, the upgrades specific to this faction buff drones in old and new ways, like expanding the number of drones players can field or giving them shorter respawn timers.

• The Tyrians are a mysterious faction that specialize in sensors and stealth. Some existing sensor- and detection-related enemies have been reassigned to this faction. When facing these enemies, you will be engaged from longer distances than usual, and they also include an AoE stealth unit that can hide its allies from your detection. Player ships from this faction have strong sensors and some other unique stat combinations that make them stand out. If you're looking to kite or snipe, get to unlocking these!

• The Blackguard are disfigured by radiation and fly weird-looking, highly tessellated ships. All units of the Blackguard spawn with randomly rolled weapons, similar to how the player's own loot is generated. This makes them highly unpredictable and potentially extremely dangerous - just like players, they can have weapons that permanently damage stats and do high damage very quickly. Since player gear is already random, playable Blackguard ships instead have randomized stats that change on every embark. Upgrades from this faction are diverse but include some very impactful progression items, such as starting gear level or warp difficulty increase.

A new mission type has been added, requiring you to protect a Catharingian freighter from periodically spawning enemies.

Gear has been overhauled in several ways and some additions have been made:

Armor stripping has been diversified:

• Lasers and Launcher now roll with significantly less Armor Strip on average

• Cannons roll with more Armor Strip and are intended as primary anti-armor tools

Launchers have been bifurcated:

• AdjustedLaunchers come in two new variantsRockets are fast, but do less damage, Torpedoes are slow, but do more damage. All missiles have had their base and scaling damage values increased.

Lasers have been tweaked to limit the tick amount their status effects apply and reign in their damage rates, to no longer outclass all other options at high levels.

Cannons have had a special calculation added that scales their damage based on firerate, so low-firerate cannons do more damage to account for their lower hit probability.

I've also introduced soft range caps on all weapons to further solidify their roles and the balance between them. These can be overcome with the right upgrades.

New perks and module abilities have been added:

• Spread cannons fire multiple shots at once. They have reduced range and a cone-like accuracy penalty to compensate for the increase in damage.

• Split missiles divide into four sub-projectiles midway to their targets, increasing the total damage and resistance to point defense.

• Retargeting missiles can re-seek onto new enemies if they are still in flight while their original target dies.

• Tracer projectiles have been reworked into Disruptor projectiles, which decrease a target's sensor strength on hit.

• Sniper Sensors have been reworked into Target Painters, which increase the signature of all current sensor contacts.

• Lure Sensors have been added. These will draw the attention of idle enemies of a specific faction in a similar way to the Lure POI.

• Armor Blast modules convert your armor into an AoE explosion with a randomly rolled integer factor.

Several modules and perks have also received balancing passes to make their values more reasonable.

Set Bonuses have been tweaked and expanded:

• The Summoner Set Bonus now increases the drones spawned per slot with its 2-Piece effect, instead of turning weapon slots to drone slots.

• All Set Bonuses have had extra scaling effects added, meaning they will continue to give bonuses past the 4-Piece effect - see the new Extractor POI below on how this is possible.

Among the new Points of Interest are some notable new additions and changes:

• Forges have been tweaked to be less effective at buffing most stats, to account for exponential scaling

• New Extractor POIs have been added. Interact with these to destroy a Set Bonus module and keep its Set Bonus - this enables Set Bonuses to scale beyond their normal 4-Piece effect if you are lucky and persistent enough!

Notable miscellaneous changes:

• AddedSensor target display logic has changed to reduce clutter in high-density encountersDrones will no longer show their range without being hovered, and a new visual effect has been added to indicate targetability.

• Range preview spheres have been added to weapons on the overview. This replaces the previous behaviour, where weapons would show a line from the ship to the targeted enemy upon being hovered (this has become redundant with the new weapon activity display on the sensor targets).

• Drones and Fleet members have had their movement behaviour changed, they now fly significantly faster to better keep up with cruising players.

• Ships that have weapons added after they spawn (Drones, Fleet members, Blackguard) now correctly adjust their internal engagement range to match weapons.

• Difficulty scaling has been tweaked: The game now scales enemy health, damage and range scaling independently. Health and damage will scale more aggressively past difficulty 1000 than they did in the demo, meaning the game will get harder more quickly.

• Loot generation and rarity calculation has been changed. There are now fewer rarities, and loot scales further into the difficulty curve. Blackguard-dropped loot has an adjusted curve and special considerations, like being able to roll radiation status effect.

• Fire status has been tweaked to work as a direct-to-hull damage type, or "true damage". This makes it significantly more powerful, both for players and enemies.

• Drones have had their Overview sensor bubble graphic removed to improve visual clarity.

• A lifetime limit has been added for missiles, deleting them after a duration derived from their range. This will reduce instances of "missile spam", where a ridiculous amount of them fly in circles forever.

• Main Menu buttons for credits and leaderboard have been added.

• New Sound Effects have been added to many UI elements, improving feel and responsiveness.

• New Music has been added to both the main menu, ship select and general ambient soundtrack.

• New Achievements have been added, covering all faction objectives and several "completionist" challenges like unlocking all ships.

• Intro and Outro cinematics have been added, including voice over by Zflocco

• Countless other minor changes, tweaks and bugfixes that are too numerous to list; most of them concerning release content.

The Chaotic Gate

When all faction objectives are finished, you will have the opportunity to spend resources on the construction of the Chaotic Gate, the final "endgame" for Catharage. This structure sits behind Catharage station and allows you to perform a special, uncontrolled warp into more random, more difficult encounters. Warping like this is similar to how it works in the demo, but since the release version features many more points of interest and enemies, the variance is even higher. Chaotic warps will increase the encounter difficulty more quickly than normally, and completing missions in chaotic encounters will net you an entry on the new chaotic leaderboard, exclusive to endgame players. This mode is intended as both a source of more currency and a competition for highscore, and will be expanded with more exclusive POIs and enemies in the post-launch content update!

Performance and Bugs

While performance improvements have been made during the demo and playtest phase, the main rendering bottleneck (raymarched volumetrics) remains a significant performance factor in the release version. It can be adjusted with the "volumetrics downsampling" option in the menu to decrease its performance cost. I will work on further tweaking and optimizing this feature in the future.

The game is generally stable and all major bugs found during the demo and playtesting phases have been addressed, with one exception: There is an extremely rare crash that can occur when resuming a suspended run. Because of its high rarity (two testers have encountered it once in ~100 hours of gameplay each) it has been impossible to intentionally reproduce and as such, difficult to address conclusively. There is recovery functionality to credit the resources from this run to players that encounter the crash, but it remains an issue that I will continue to investigate.

World generation may exhibit some edge case behaviour in rare circumstances: Combined fog and skybox lighting may be very bright, making it difficult to see far away objects on high gamma screens, and players and objects may very rarely spawn inside megaliths - if this occurs, note that you can fly out of these objects without colliding with them.

Updates, patches and the future of the game

After launch, I will spend time monitoring the relevant channels (Steam forums, Discord, direct contact) to gather feedback and probably find out about more new bugs. Depending on the amount and severity of these upcoming issues, be they balancing or bugs, a patch may come before christmas to address them. After christmas I'll be on a winter holiday until mid-january, but I will continue to fix issues and make improvements where necessary afterwards.

Catharage is built to be easily and quickly expandable with content, and I expect to release at least one post-launch content update with some of the things that didn't quite make it in time for the full version. Beyond that, community feedback will determine how far I take this game - I'm happy to keep working on it, but I also have plans for new games already cooking ;-)

If you're reading this waiting for the release, I hope you have fun with the game, if you're new, check out the demo to see if it's for you!