You're Approved!

I have wonderful news - after being delayed by bureaucratic ineptitude for many years, your application to join The Elite Order of Magic Space Wizards has finally been processed and approved! You’ll never have to fly another harvesting drone again! From now on, you’ll be able to optikinetically project yourself directly into enemy space, and wreak magical havoc without fear of damaging or losing your expensive equipment!

On the practical side, this also means your vision will no longer be obstructed by your drone’s frame, so you’ll have an easier time seeing everything around you.

Each time you collect enough Magic Woo-Woo, you’ll be able to upgrade your enchantment without having to wait for the end of a mission - which is a Good Thing(TM) because your missions will be much longer now.

Upgrading the Upgrades

In response to feedback, observation, and conversations at and after SEGE , I’ve also been streamlining and reworking the upgrade selection process.

Under the new system, you will be presented with exactly 3 upgrade options each time. These options will come from 3 different randomly-selected upgrade trees - the same trees which were already being used by the janky upgrade selection dialog (which was, itself, only ever intended to serve as a crude prototype). The tiers within each tree still unlock in the same way, but the game will only present options which have already been unlocked.

You no longer teleport away to select upgrades, and the game does not pause while you ponder your choice, but the saucers will stop firing and you will be invulnerable until your selection is made.

What else?

I’ve shared a handful of minor updates and screenshots in the new [c]#random-dev-updates[/c] channel of the Discord, but if you’re interested in the nitty-gritty, here’s a full rundown of what has changed since last Friday:

Visuals

• A variety of rendering parameters have been slightly modified, to unify the appearances of web builds and standalone builds.

• Generic “LED” indicators in the drone frame have been replaced by more abstract onscreen indicators, each of which bears a symbol indicating what it represents.

• Indicators flash whenever their value is changed to, or changed away from, absolute zero (this extends their existing behavior of flashing whenever their value is changed by a non-trivial amount).

Gameplay

• Instead of collecting “gears” to earn upgrades, and collecting “orbs” to end the mission, the mission is now of fixed duration, the “orbs” now earn immediate upgrades, and the “gears” have been removed.

• Shots from saucers will no longer break crystals - instead, they will damage crystals by removing half of their remaining health.

• A Difficulty Slider has been added to the Options Menu. This affects both the spawn rate and the firing rate of the saucers.

Upgrades

• Complete overhaul of upgrade selection dialog, which now presents 3 clear and simple options.

• Upgrades are now selected during gameplay, with the player being invulnerable and the saucers ceasing to fire.

• Shields are instantly recharged when an upgrade is earned.

• The pause menu can now be accessed from the upgrade selection dialog (by pressing [c]Esc[/c]).

• Began changing the concept of upgrades from “upgrade modules” to “enchantments”, to better fit the new framing narrative.

Internal

• Renamed several data types to make the system easier to understand and reason about.

• The location of the player is now fixed in 3D space, and all other objects are located relative to it. This prevents floating point rounding glitches when flying a long distance away from the world origin (which was not a concern for previous gameplay designs which involved missions of 1 minute or less, but can be an issue now that missions are getting longer).