Hello, it's me!

It's time for an out of schedule update, so to make up for the past couple weeks of small updates, I decided to sit down and crunch in as many hours of development as I could into this one week.  Let's get into the changes:

Performance improvements

As I mentioned about 2 dev blogs ago, the game suffered quite some issues with performance that I addressed with a few settings that players could choose from, with this update I focused closely on making the game run much better and to an extend I succeeded, of course there is a ton more to optimize but that will come later down the line. Here are some examples:

Integrated graphics card's performance have been raised from about 10-15 fps on the lowest settings to about 30-40 fps on some settings set to medium

My old laptop managed to squeeze almost stable 60 fps on high settings when previously it barely managed to maintain it at low

Higher end PC's didn't have any problems running it but it should be much better now too with a stable 144 fps on the highest settings

Graphics improvements

With the spare performance I also decided to move forward with throwing out asset store models and replacing them with my own, that closely fit the aesthetics that I've been going for, here are some examples this is how it looked before:

And here is how it looks now:

It both looks and runs much better! Also, object placement such as trees are now random, so enjoy a slightly different experience each time

Important to note is that 3D grass can be very taxing on low end hardware, so it is disabled by default

Settings improvements

New options have been added to settings, such as "High" render distance, which is sort of a middle ground between "Far" and "Medium", also render distance now means what is says, before it was controlling level of detail, which now has a separate set of options to chose from.

New option for object density is also available and helps you to control how many objects will be randomly generated on the map, in case the amount of trees makes your CPU/GPU cry, it does make my cry.

An option to enable 3D grass is also located in the settings and is disabled by default, be careful when 3D grass is enabled with high grass render distance since it can nuke FPS even on high end hardware

Also after doing some testing and noting performance impact of each setting, I displayed it into the menu as well!

So when the FPS is not quite right, you can try tweaking the high to very high impact settings first.

There were also 2 bugs in the settings menu before:

- Some preset settings set render scaling to 75% instead of a 100%, that was a mistake on my part after expanding render scaling options and is now adjusted

- Changing shadow settings didn't actually do anything, now it does

Performance meter

I replaced my previous FPS counter with a new performance meter than you can open at any moment with F3 or toggle different modes with F2 to monitor a performance

So if you ever want to report any performance issues, please attach a screenshot with the meter on.

Revamped tutorial

The last tutorial was, to put it simply, annoying.

It was mostly a test to see if I can go in the direction that most mobile games go but quickly decided that I always hated that approach, so instead, starting from now there is a new wiki available in game that I plan on expanding as time goes on. If you haven't seen the old tutorial yet, the new one will be opened the first time you start up the game! 

Here is how it looks:

You can read up on different aspects of the game and familiarize yourself!

New character

Welcome Alice, to the team!

Alice is a lightning type character sending down rains of thunderbolts across the battlefield, and when the time is right, use her ability to cut forth with a speed of light, dealing damage to all enemy units and giving her a short burst of cooldown reduction on all of her weapons!

Thanks to few CDR buffs, she doesn't need to rely on perfect upgrades to attack quickly. Swift as lightning itself~ With her appearance she also brings the new weapon "Lightning strike" that targets random enemies and zaps them with a thunderbolt from the skies, survive 15 minutes with Alice to unlock that weapon!

With her, there are 2 more characters that I plan on releasing in the near future. Then I will shift my focus on other things, but that's a topic I shall touch upon in a moment.

New weapon

Aside from Alice's "Lightning strike" I also added a character unrelated weapon "Wind Shear" that can be unlocked by finding it out in the Capital Outskirts. Summon a ball of wind that applies high DoT status on enemies and help yourself to secure a victory!

Buffs

So I noticed after comparing a few characters, that Natalie really falls behind everyone else early on, to fix that the "Tornado" weapon got a hefty buff and should be much more useful now. It also had some mistakes where the description said one thing but the actual effect was different.

Gatcha pity system

It could be very annoying when you try to get a new character that just released but you keep on getting duplicates of the same old ones you already maxed out. 

I added a pity system, every 10 pulls you are guaranteed a NEW character, that should help you collect the new ones much quicker

Minor improvements

• Level selection menu have gotten some touch ups to comply with the rest of design
• Replace old item pickups assets with new ones
• Corina's sprite size was much bigger than others, she got shrank now :(
• Not every window could be closed with ESC button, it's been fixed now
• Fixed a bug that prevented player from obtaining gold after finishing a run if discord integration was enabled but discord wasn't running (that is the second time discord prevented the game from running correctly I hope it's fine now)

Future plans

And that's it! This one was much bigger and a lot have been achieved. As I mentioned, there are still 2 more characters in the pipeline, and then 3 more later down the line but those need to get special treatment so no timeline for them yet.

I'm planning to continue on improving the performance, this time regarding the code logic itself but that will take time and careful consideration before I could even start.

But the next thing on the table is the VFX, abilities can often feel underwhelming and there isn't much hit feedback or anything like that. So that's something I will look into in the upcoming updates, new map will have to wait it seems, rightfully so since I still want to spend more time on the Capital Outskirts to add some more hand crafted details into it.