Hello!

It's a me again, I overlayed a few changes coming in version 1.3.0 in an update last week and so, the version is finally here! Thanks to bringing the development over to Twitch I managed to gather some additional voices and playtesters and this little change helped out a ton!

Lets overview some core issues addressed in this version.

Difficulty scaling

I've been battling the difficulty scaling for a while now but balancing it across so many different characters proved to be a bit of a challenge. All in all, recent changes made the game pretty much impossible to beat with some characters, which as you can imagine, wasn't a good thing. Additionally early game experience was rather poor and didn't improve as the game progressed. 

So, what have I done this time?

• Additional enemy stats scaling, previously the same enemy always had the same stats regardless of the stage of the game, with this version, enemies are slower and weaker early on and gradually gain power alongside player
• Health and movement speed of all enemies have been toned down to give more space for actual gameplay 
• Increased damage related stats gained from permanent upgrades so gold can actually get you some more significant power-ups 

On top of that each character got their very own skill (perk) tree system to help push them ever so slightly higher and reward players for their dedication!

These aren't very significant but can improve characters in places where they need it the most. Each level rewards one skill point that can be used to unlock one of these skill nodes.

Character shards

Another big change appears in the shards collection. Each character duplicate obtained via gatcha rewards 1 out of 5 shards for given character. If you ever glanced over them it was rather difficult to get excited about unlocking pretty much any of them since the upgrades were rather insignificant. 

In this version every character got their shards completely reworked, no longer do they provide weak upgrades to stats nobody cares about but instead will overhaul or even alter the way you would play or build them! 

Most of these shards now focus on improving character ultimate and main weapon, pushing for more build variety for niche playstyles. After all, why shouldn't that maxed out character breeze through the first stage of the game, right? Initially I wanted to list all the changes here but ain't nobody got time for that... 

Art quality on all shards have also been improved to be more pleasant to look at.

Lets move on to more minor changes now

• Arika's ultimate was completely changed to provide a field boosting her damage over time
• There was a global limit of 5 chests on map, it was now changed to a 100 active crates but no more than 5 can spawn around the player at once - that means you can now venture further and crates will still appear nearby
• Gold acquisition formula have been altered, games will provide less gold later on (I bought out an entire shop with a 30 minutes game)
• Explosions caused by black orbs were spawned in incorrect place, rendering them pretty useless
• Final boss of stage one had messed up hitboxes on its attacks, they have been adjusted
• Explosions caused by electric orbs were spawned in incorrect locations (yes, same problem as black orbs)
• Healing field spawned in incorrect location as well (thanks pooling)
• Using scroll wheel on tutorial menus was very slow, it is no longer slow
• Chitose's dash distance was tied to FPS meaning higher fps = longer dash, it is fixed now
• Collecting EXP gems from the ground only filled the bar until the next level, meaning overflow EXP was lost
• Pity logic incorrectly reset itself back to 10
• Electric orb ascensions did not match selected upgrades
• Alice have been released in 1.2.0 yet I never marked her as pullable, so technically she released now in 1.3.0 :)
• Clicking play without selecting a character on first start caused the game to pick the last character used in development, it will now default to first character on the list if no character have been played before
• Gem of Dream's laser frequency upgrade displayed 0 instead of 0.15
• Fixed a big where picking up upgrades could leave the game in a frozen state, fixable by pressing escape

I probably missed a few things but most important features/changes have been listed. 

I will stop making prediction for now because frankly I suck at keeping with them : ) but I definitely want to explore the possibility for implementing co-op. I bet there is some reason why survivor-likes do not usually have multiplayer, we shall see, till the next time!