Rocket Cave Adventure Update 8

It's been a week or two since my last update post. I have still been working on the game! I've been publishing the builds to the beta branch so that the main branch updates will be bigger. So... here's a big one!

Features:

• All skills have proper names now along with icons

• Added skill [Magic carpet] -> On kill, fill your booster charges to capacity

• Added skill [Sugar cubes] -> On kill, fill your thruster charges to capacity

• Added skill [Speedometer] -> Increase the strength of booster controls (left stick)

• Added skill [Boxing glove] -> Increases the speed of [Plasmapult]'s projectiles

• Added skill [Rose] -> On level up, percent chance to get an extra health

• Added skill [7.62 round] -> On kill, percent chance for 2x experience

• Added skill [Helmet] -> Percent chance to ignore damage

• Added skill [Pickaxe] -> Damaging fallen rocks will destroy them

• Added skill [Sledgehammer] -> Touching breakable objects instantly breaks them

• Added skill [Spiked mace] -> Taking damage does 1 damage to your attacker

• Added skill [Barometer] -> Show a timer in the top-left depicting when the ceiling will begin to fall

• Added skill [Hourglass] -> Get extra time before the ceiling starts falling

• Added skill [Gambling chip] -> Chests have an increased chance to spawn a die

• Added skill [Floor candy] -> When entering a new floor, small percent chance for +1 health

• Some skills now have a small chance to spawn a rarer version of themselves

• Added rare skill [Gold vacuum aura] - Passively draw all of the gold in an area around you

• Added enemy: Slime

• Added enemy: Jellyfish

• Added enemy: Monkey

• Added object: XP ore - is like the gold ore you can mine, but gives you 4 XP instead of gold

• Added object: Summoning bell - in some levels, a bell can be found. Ring it to spawn enemies for additional gold and XP

• Added new collectible: Dice - each collected die through the run grants a free reroll. They have a 25% chance to spawn in chests

• [Bombdrop]'s bombs now have SFX and VFX

• If you beat the boss without taking damage, you are rewarded with an extra treasure chest

• The Giant Skull boss has been given a new, better-looking model

• The Giant Skull boss now has stages to the boss fight

• Added Giant Skull boss music track

• The skill tree menu now shows if a skill's mastery is reached with a star icon for readability

• The row number of the skill tree is now shown in the skill tree menu

• Added a gamepad button shortcut for binding skills in the skill tree

• Active status effects are displayed in the top right (the only status effect right now is the gold vacuum effect)

• The player skills UI (bottom left) now uses a gradient instead of numbers to display when the skill is finished charging

• Added a run timer to the top left of the screen

• Renamed [Lasershot] to [Plasmapult]

• When the player reaches 1 health, smoke is shown coming from your vehicle along with a smoke SFX

• Added spikes visual to the falling ceiling to convey that the ceiling will hurt you

• Game icon added to .exe and taskbar

• Added a bunch more tips to be read in between loading levels (if you have enough time)

Balance changes:

• [Bombdrop] -> bombs are now sticky bombs - you can stick them to entities and walls

• [Gold vacuum] -> increased charge time

• [Coin stack] -> reduced double gold on kill chance from 25% per mastery to 15%

• [Plasma globe] -> max mastery changed from 2 to 1

• [Takeout] -> max mastery changed from 2 to 1

• The [Auto turret] skill works more consistently now using a raycast instead of projectile

• Tried to make the [Stabalizer] skill more reliable (yet again...)

• [Bombdrop] -> if deployed when moving upwards, the bomb is thrown upwards so you can now attach the bomb to the ceiling

• Changed when the falling ceiling starts to fall. Before the ceiling would fall 90 seconds into the level. Now, it falls 75 seconds into the level with 5 extra seconds per level depth

• The falling ceiling no longer insta-kills you, it does 1 damage per hit and throws you downwards

• A particle trail now shows what direction the Giant Skull boss is moving towards

• Each area grants extra gold found in chests (Caves vs Jungles)

Bugs fixed:

• The SFX options menu option did nothing (the volume and SFX options need to be changed with the mouse for now... sorry, dropdowns are annoying)

• Mushrooms and other objects that stick to the ground would spawn floating off of the ground (mostly fixed)

• Mushrooms and other objects that stick to the ground would not be destroyed properly when the ground was destroyed

• Once the falling ceiling reached the player, it would continuously hit the player and make an annoying sound

• The player console (bottom right info) would display the wrong text when taking damage sometimes

• The quick restart gamepad button shortcut did not work in the death postgame menu

• The skill tree could not be closed with the gamepad button shortcut

• The skill tree could be opened in The Pit

• The skill tree could be opened if the death postgame menu was showing

• The bind skills button was interactable in the meta-shop

• The unlock button was interactable in the meta-shop even if you could not unlock the skill

• When binding an active skill, you could still upgrade and reroll skills

• When binding skills, you could close the skill tree menu and the bind would not be saved

• You could change the bindings of base skills (such as the thrusters and boosters)

• Duplicate skills did not have their images while the originals did

• The loading screen could be paused (lol)

• You could unpause the game when the yes/no menu was shown

• The player could fling themselves too far into the boss room - the player will now be pushed back if that happens

• When the Giant Skull boss is spawned on level load, their damage noise played briefly

• The Giant Skull boss would infinitely shake the screen if it killed you

• If you died and restarted the game in The Pit, you would respawn inside of a run instead of back at The Pit

• Flying skulls and UFOs would fly beneath the exit platform making them hard to kill and an exit hazard

• The game could be quick-started into a run even if the tutorial was not completed yet

• The Air Tank object would not properly kill the player - you would be stuck half-alive unable to move

• The falling ceiling's color now matches the most prominent color in the level - so in the Caves, it has been changed to the rock color to the dirt color. In the jungle, it is the rock color

• Tut's engine noise would never stop if he was close to you when beginning a run

• The [Plasmapult] projectile could interact with an invisible collider in the tutorial room where you pick up [Plasmapult]

That took a while to write up... As you can see there are 3 new enemies, 3 new objects, and 15 new skills! Also a bunch of balance changes and bug fixes. A bunch of numbers were tweaked too that I forgot to record like some enemy movements, gold spawn rate, and skill upgrade costs. I will do better in the future to track those changes. Finally, I usually upload a new build to the beta branch every day or so, so if you'd like to see content added more frequently, opt-in to the beta branch of the game!

Thanks,

Thomas boxedworks