Patch Notes v.0.80.0

v.0.80.0

Patch Summary

This patch adds adds a wormhole collapse to the singleplayer run that pushes the player forward, reworks the final boss and adjusts difficulty of event battles as well as some bug fixes and visual updates.

Overview

Wormhole Collapse

The first version of Star Scum's singleplayer mode featured an open-world map where you could freely go wherever you pleased at your own pace. Over the course of playtesting, the map was reduced more and more to limit lateral movement and direct players towards the goal. While the map ended up resembling the modern deckbuilder run tree in the end, I still wanted to give players a way to move around the map as freely as possible to create a sense of space and provide more opportunities to loot ships for new cards.

What ended up happening of course is that many players visited EVERY node on the map to maximize their chances of getting the best cards and each run would turn into a slog, taking hours to complete. So, to solve this problem, I decided to not reinvent the wheel and add the tried and true solution: a collapsing ring of difficulty that follows the player, pushing them ever forward.

Now, every time you move on the map, the wormhole collapses behind the player. Battles that take place beyond the edge of the collapse have tougher ships and a Wormhole Storm event card that is played every turn, dealing area damage to random tiles of both ships. These battles are still possible to win, but players take a big risk fighting in the collapsing storm.

The original system preventing you from going backwards (respawning tougher ships after visiting stations) has been removed and ships no longer respawn.

Final Boss Rework

The original final boss was the least playtested area of the game and was probably its weakest and most problematic part. Most players who ended up reaching it were frustrated by its mechanics and the way it nullified some aspects of the player's deck.

So, I decided to rework the final boss from the ground up. The new final boss still plays around with the player's deck, an aspect of the final battle that I wanted to keep, but this time I hope it's a more interesting and less frustrating mechanic. I'm sure that there is still some balancing to be done as other players interact with it, so let me know how it feels if you get to it!

Event Difficulty Changes

Previously, events that had a custom deck battles attached to it were randomly spread through the map without regard for the difficulty of the battle, which led to many run-ending event encounters. This change introduces scaling for the custom decks per sector, so the same event will pick from 3 different custom decks based on which sector it ends up generating in. There is still more balancing to do, but this should go a long way towards making these fights more manageable.

Detailed Change List

Gameplay

• Added a Wormhole Collapse to the overworld map.

• Added ability for events to define custom decks per section.

Cards, Ships and Balancing

• Cards added: Wormhole Storm, Void Rift, Void Core

• Added new faction type: Voidoid

• Bioweapon Egg timer is now 3.

• Reduced Portal Core timer to 7.

• Updated custom decks for all events to scale difficulty per section.

Graphics and Audio

• Improved overworld map visuals and added wormhole collapse effect.

• Updated some card back designs.

• Explosions now highlight their area damage tiles.

• Increased core entity sprites slightly.

• Updated some damage sound effects.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed fires spawning on fire damage kills not preventing other units from moving and spawning on the same tile.

• Fixed screenshake when damage is dealt to cores that are immune to that type of damage.

• Fixed some typos in copy.

• Fixed nodes not saving their sector and all bosses using sector 1 boss background and music after reload.