Version 3 is here!

TL:DR; New update, new leaderboard, new trailer, unit animations, total rebuild, improvements to visual clarity and performance. Launchpads removed to make way for a teleport mechanic.

Well it's been a total clusterf*** of a year, rife with a bunch of craziness.

After realising that an update to the newest version of Unity ended up decreasing performance significantly (absolute garbage FPS), along with realising how many things were just messy and not how I wanted the game to be looking and functioning, it turned out the best solution to it was just rebuilding the Unity project from the ground up.

It wasn't a complete do-over; at least I had all the old scripts, models, and audio assets, but the project scenes needed to be completely built again. I also went through the models for all the environment and units, doing cleanup operations to dramatically reduce the vertex counts (the average vertex count in V2 was over 1 million (usually more) and now it's closer to 3-400,000. I did a bunch of debugging and looking at performance sinks, and reduced unnecessary graphics draw calls and inefficient object find operations. (Always fun looking at your n00b work from way back and having to rework that stuff)

Having now done that, and though it took a good month of backtracked progress, I can now say it's fully been worth it. The game is now looking and playing much better than it used to, and a lot closer to being something I can be just genuinely proud of. There were a lot of delays, such as life stuff, a covid lockdown, work stuff, my computer just deciding it wanted to end itself and needing a replacement CPU and Motherboard, and other miscellaneous shenanigans. Regardless, I've been able to keep myself sane (comparatively) with this project and it's been a blast making it better than it was before.

Anyway, on to the updates!

• New leaderboard! Since the mechanics have changed a bit by now, I figure it's time for there to be a refreshed leaderboard so people can compete with the new mechanics.

• The store page now has an updated trailer! Please do share it around if you're so inclined, it'd help a lot!

• Most important enemies now have actual animations! This should help with making them a bit more dynamic rather than just floating statues. Revenants (basic enemies) also have a melee bomb attack to discourage letting armies of them get too close to you. (More melee attacks and enemy dynamics to come in later updates)

• Numerous other stat tweaks.

• Complete visual overhaul, not only for performance purposes but also for visual clarity (visual clarity being a big focus of the rebuild, as this was a common complaint for a lot of people)

• Launchpads removed (at least for now) as this tended to increase issues in visual clarity and also ended up making for pretty cheesy gameplay as it allowed for very easy dodging tricky situations, and get people into loops of just running for launchpads constantly. This has been replaced with a teleport mechanic (acquired from the spirit altar), which allows you to instantly relocate to another location/altar, but has a 40ish second cooldown. (I'd recommend redoing the tutorial to familiarise yourself with this.)

There's still a long way to go before I can call this project done, but hopefully not too much longer before I can do something like a proper early access of the full game. If there's bugs, please do let me know!

Thank you everyone for your support so far, I couldn't have gotten to this point without the people cheering me on to keep this going and not just lose heart.

Merry Christmas, Happy holidays, and much love, V0ID