Cubed and Dangerous Version 1.5

Many pieces of feedback were beautifully delivered in Steam Reviews, and remains a great way to support games you love, the steam community and help developers learn and grow. So thank you everyone who has done that so far!

Here's a high-level summary of what you can find in this new update.

Difficulty

Onboarding new players has been an interesting tug-of-war in the realm of difficulty balancing. Some players are finding this game (or other twin stick shooters) for the first time, having been exposed to more survivor likes or bullet heaven games. Others are here because they've played classics like Nuclear Throne / Enter the Gungeon and are looking for some more mayhem.

To satisfy players across this spectrum, I've tried to balance the difficulty for early runs while still providing a challenge. The result just hasn't really lived up to what I was looking for.

This patch changes the way difficulty works by enabling the challenge mode selector, available on skill selection page before a new run, for all players.

This will default to "off" so if you don't see it or just want to jump into your first run, you can still play on a relatively easy difficulty. But if you're a veteran coming in and want a challenge before you've unlocked more end game content, you can now select some of the earlier challenges to significantly ramp things up. The choice is now fully yours! Apologies for not bringing this feature closer to the front of early runs before.

Balance

All weapons and tactical items have had a balance pass, and are just too numerous to mention here. You'll have to try them out and see if things feel better than before. Nothing large and sweeping has been changed because most of the balance in feedback was that things felt pretty good overall, and many builds are viable.

Flamethrower weapon classes still received a little bit of a buff, some of the explosives were toned down just a tiny bit since they scale across many different perk selections and strategies. Ammo was increased for a few weapons as well.

I am also keeping an eye on ammo in general, potentially could overhaul that entire system if there's enough feedback about it.

Stability / Useability

The game has been pretty stable for a while now, no reported crashes in months. So that's been great! There are a few places where some weird behavior was noticed though, so I've taken this opportunity to revamp a bunch of things in the UI to make it more stable:

• Escape key on the keyboard was interacting with a few screens in really weird ways

• Unboxing animation didn't call out relics as special items

• Challenge mode selector was sometimes not visible at all (overhauled in the callout above)

• Game title added to main menu

• Cursor improvements to not lose it on most levels (keeping an eye on this one too)

• Enemy AI improvements, bosses will be a little more responsive to the player and their actions

• Fixed a small bug that could sometimes result in the wrong items unboxing

• Fixed unlock all buttons so they actually work more often now (all the time ideally)

More and more

There are also a ton of smaller bugs around weird interactions that have all been cleared up. Places where spamming buttons could cause strange UI or interaction behavior, shops could have glitched out inventories, etc. Safe to say, if you experienced some odd behavior in a run in the past, there's a good chance it was in the huge bug list tackled this time around.

Feedback

As always, I'd love to hear your feedback. The players are instrumental in this process, both from the perspective of supporting this game as well as impacting the development of future games (Sheep for the Stars being one of the more recent games released). I want to hear what you think, what you'd like to see, what you already love, why it's your favorite game, or anything else you want to share.

Reach out through the communities here, Steam Reviews, Discord Server, or the new Ace High Arcade Subreddit. I try to make sure I read every single review or post to know what I'm doing well and what can be improved.