0.3.0 is here!

Highlights

• Major walking castle renovations. Better, more detailed art that is also significantly more optimized. The walking castle also now has "cup holders" that hold mini castles.

• Mini castles have real art now, and there are now three types: mine, refine, combat. Each type has unique abilities and provides buffs to nearby building of the same type.

• Professionally done branding and capsule art. Also a total redesign of the Steam page.

• A branching dialog system that will be used all over the game.

• TREES! Also the walking castles and large enemies can crush the trees! Buildings and scrapfalls also knock down trees. And the trees are super efficient because they are instanced, pooled, have LODs, and optimized textures!

• Resource pipes!

  • More advanced method of placement lets them wind around buildings and other obstacles.

  • Animated construction and destruction with sound effects.

  • Turrets now require resource pipe connections to function.

  • Vassal castles now use the same buildable resource pipes as the buildings, instead of the old flexible variant.

  • Added two more functional resource pipe connections to the player's castle.

  • Custom LODs that maintain the functionality of their dynamic material.

Other Additions and Improvements

• All buildings have new textures and improved designs that require significantly fewer draw calls to render and use much less texture memory.

• Improved navigation abilities of the mini castles and of the enemies.

• Several small improvements and optimizations of particle systems.

• A building's or turret's upgrade level is now shown in its name after clicking on it.

• Improved VFX for buildings.

• Added more detail and character to most of the NPC buildings too.

• Improved visuals of enemy spawners.

• The big castle has new foot step sounds.

• Mini castles have foot step sounds now.

• Changed the names of the enemies to better reflect the lore / story.

• Improved scrapfall destruction effects.

• New death particle effect for the large enemies.

• Added more detail to and optimized enemy unit art. (more is on the way)

• Doubled the resource amounts in the resource deposits near the first scrapfall to make its even less likely that new players run out during the tutorial.

• Changed the color of glowing "sci-fi tech stuff" from light blue to a yellow because I think it fits better and is less generic.

• The backstory / lore is now introduced in the tutorial and added throughout the demo.

• NPC villages now have their own turret designs unique from the player.

Controls and Game feel

• Double click will now jump the camera to any unit or building, not just the castle.

• Reworked camera zoom. It is now smoother, default zoom speed is much faster, and the zoom speed scales on a curve so that it moves slower and more precisely when close up and faster when zoomed out.

• Buildings that require pipe connections to the castle now have flashing indicators when they are unplugged and in your control range.

• Buildings now flash an indicator when they begin receiving a buff to their stats.

• Camera rotation controls and speed now change based on whether or not the camera is free or orbiting the castle.

• Added tool tips to building preview to describe why locations are invalid.

• Added a tool-tip type widget that shows the reason why a resource pipe fails to build. Hovers beside the cursor.

• Turning a pipe junction off / disabling it now propagates the on / off signal downstream.

UI Changes

• When launching the game for the first time, the game will now run a hardware benchmark test and attempt to auto assign graphics settings based on the results. (tell me if it does a good job)

• Replaced the FPS counter in the graphics menu with a superior FPS graph.

• Windowed mode setting buttons now highlight to show the current mode.

• Added an uncapped option to the FPS settings.

• Mini-castles are now outlined when you mouse over their respective menu button.

• Enemies now have red outlines when clicked on.

• UI improvements for buildings.

• Building UI enable / disable button has been renamed to ON / OFF and now it works correctly.

• Added more graphics settings to the settings menu.

• Redesigned the audio settings menu and added a reset button.

• Created a save game file for the options graphics and audio options.

Bug Fixes and Optimizations

• Added material quality switch parameters to some of the more expensive materials, like the water. This lets the game switch between cheap and expensive versions based on graphics settings.

• Fixed a few minor bugs with the resource pipes.

• Fixed a bug with the resource pipe previews that happened when double clicking.

• Fixed a bug causing the sniper turret to apply damage twice.

• Fixed an issue where the camera sometimes got "stuck" on the terrain.

• Fixed some typos and incorrect information in some descriptions.

• Added more LODs to buildable buildings.