January Dev Update

Hi everyone!

Here’s a look at what we’ve been working on in January.

This Month’s Progress

• Loads of new art. Icons (replacing our mountain of text-based backup icons). Variation among the different biomes. Two new stations: Rocket Station and Bombard Station.

• 5 playable story chapters. Bosses are in the middle of a large overhaul, but everything else is in place. It's rewarding to finally see the story get implemented in the game!

• Several passes to fill out and build up our various tech trees though the meta discovery tree was the primary focus. Those are the permanent improvements that players can purchase between the different runs. We still have a few more things to add there, but we're finally happy with the overall variety and strategic paths available to players. As part of those passes, all the buff numbers got bigger and more exciting, too.

• We finally did a long-delayed pass on the types of projectiles in the game. The big three: bullets, rockets (missiles), and shells. We also have melee ships and beam weapons, but those are less common. Of course, once that was done, we had to add more techs (both colony techs during runs and meta techs between runs) as well as enhancements (customizations on ship rolls) and relics (earned by players to provide giant upgrades/variations during runs).

• Loads of new relics. We've added 23 new relics this month to bring us to 84 total relics. The list of desired relics isn't getting any shorter, though, so we'll keep on adding them in between other tasks.

• Bughunting. We spent two or three person-weeks chasing down everything from combats that acted badly, stability, a few rogue perf issues, and some overdue widescreen fixes. Gamepad controls got a lot of polish and attention in there, too.

• Free Play game mode got ascensions. Free Play unlocks after you finish the first story chapter. Ascension 1 is unlocked, but each of the other 9 ascensions is unlocked by beating the previous ascension. Each ascension comes with additional challenge, of course.

• Another long put off task: dynamic text strings. Our strings now have a look-up system so that we don't have to bake the numbers for upgrades/results/etc. into strings. This is another one of those tasks we should have done forever ago, but it just never bubbled to the top because it was 'solved' and 'easy'. We needed to get it done before we starting working on the localization (translation) of the game text, though.

• Heavily related... We've started our official localization passes. A lot of prep work went into that to get the words as close-to-final as possible prior to kicking that off. As luck would have it, we realized we needed to rename a station the day after we went things off. Luckily we have at least one more loc pass scheduled.

• Lots of little gameplay tweaks... Stunned units no longer provide taunt or increase their construction. The relic that adds an area-based heal to Cobalt shield generators doesn't heal motherships. Stingers, a Slaraash Swarm beam ship, got stronger to account for the beam tracking they do. Overload (an energy based explosion triggered by energy damage buildup) only forward-chains now, so units that proc'd overload on other units can't have it proc'd back on them as a result of that same overload chain.

• Last but definitely not least... balance balance balance. We have a couple of big topics to still consider (e.g. should we slow down combat to make it easier to react), but most of the work now is solving specific situations we don't like as we playtest. We had a few Fleetbreaker vets play through the game recently; at least two died during the tutorial. That's not exactly what we want, so we'll be fixing that soon.

Yup, a lot of big updates. Let us know what else you want to see.

• The LK Team