Patch Notes 30/04/23 - Post 7DRL Jam Launch

New Features

• Added Online Leaderboard to store players highest scores
  
  • Added Leaderboard Panel accessible via Start Screen
  • Added Highscore tag field to Start Screen
  • Added Personal Best/Highscore display to Start Screen

• Added New Utility Item: Target Projection System
  • New Item adds a display icon that shows where an enemy ship will be in the future 
  • Upgrades add an additional display icon that shows where an enemy ship will be further into the future

• Added placeable waypoints to the world map
  •  Player can now choose between navigating based on the nearest shop/repair, or by waypoints

• Added Volume sliders to start menu
  
• Added Scrolling background effect to start menu

Enemy AI Changes 

• Added new weapons to Nebula specific enemies
  • Before, used the same weapons as non-nebula enemies. Now, use different weapons. New weapons can be distinguished by their colour (regular enemies shoot red projectiles, nebula specific enemies shoot pink/purple projectiles)
• Reworked and made entensive improvements to enemy ships' AI
  • Reworked Enemy Asteroid Evasion (EAE) system. 
    • EAE can now better forecast its future position
    • EAE can perform evasive maneuvers to a finer level of detail (before approx 0.5s, now approx 0.2s intervals)
    • EAE can now make necessary corrections to avoid asteroids when travelling at high speeds
  • Improved enemy ships' ability to project where the player will be
    • Improves enemies accuracy
    • Improves enemies ability to pursue player
• Reworked how the speed of enemy ships is calculated
  • Before, enemies move slower than the player and at a fixed rate over their whole lifetime. Now, enemies are generally faster, but lose speed after they spawn depending on how long they have been in the world

Tweaks and Balances

• Reworked how munition (lasers, bullets, rockets) velocity is calculated
  • Before, an absolute value was used no matter how fast the weapon was travelling. Now, munition speeds are calculated using a projection algorithm
    
• Increased spawning rate of enemies in Nebula biomes
• Swapped Enemy Shield bar colours
  
• Increased value of drops from killing enemies

Dev Comment: In the original release, killing enemies gave players very little money. Drops have been increased across the board to address this issue.

• Adjusted drop values from mining Asteroids
  • Adjusted drop values when mining different sized asteroids
  • Increased drops when an asteroid is fully mined
• Reduced the amount of asteroids that spawn in "Empty Space" significantly
• Added more variation in the rotational speed and velocity of asteroids
  
• Added SFX when firing Homing and Triple Homing Missiles 
• Adjusted Merchant ship spawning algorithm so that more shops spawn closer to the players spawn position
• Adjusted Player-Asteroid collision mechanics
  • Before player could get stuck after colliding with an asteroid. Now player bounces off asteroids 

• Adjusted various weapons damage values, base costs and upgrade costs
• Added variation in Drop rotation
• Reduced speed of Scrolling background (Stars) to a more realistic level

Bug Fixes

• Fixed Enemy health bars not following enemies correctly
• Fixed bug where world would generate incorrectly in the lower-left quadrant
• Fixed New Highscore alert on Game-Over Popup not displaying correctly
• Fixed bug where Background stars and Nebula would sometimes jitter when the player was moving at high speeds

Removed/Deprecated Features

• Removed Camera rotation

Dev comment: Camera rotation has been moved because: a) it was clunky and was hard to use with little benefit to the player and b) it caused visual distortions.

• Removed Dust effect

Dev comment: Dust effect looked a bit odd and did not convey the feeling of momentum that was desired

END