Hello!

Thought I would update you all on what's going on, that's new and how is progress on 1.6.0 going. So lets dive into it!

UI changes

As far as menus are concerned, functionally most of them are done and I will share bits and pieces in a moment. 

Currently only character perk tree is not implemented but I'm in a middle of considering what I even want to do with it, since the state it was in up till now didn't satisfy me at all.

So functionally it is done, but I still have a lot of arts to either re-do or improve, although I might release the update before these are all done and improve them over time with future updates, since it would delay 1.6.0 by additional couple weeks.

I think I can provide you all with some additional screenshots and possibly end the teasing here :)

Achievements

It displays an icon of an item it unlocks, progress into the achievement and the requirements, all kinds of filtering is also available

Recollection

aka. this game's gacha

So, there is a lot of changes with this one, rates and stuff need extensive testing but here is the gist of it:

Prior to 1.6 we had a single banner that could give you, at random, any character from the character pool, duplicates turn to shards and once you max the character out, duplicates turn into character EXP

I completely reworked how things have been, from 1.6 onwards banners will rotate every 24 hours, the character currently on the banner has a higher chance of appearing than any other characters. If you fail to obtain the main character, you will get a chance to obtain either one of the 3 characters or any other character. In case you fail to obtain any character you will be at random rewarded with gold, gems or character fragments (collect enough of these to unlock the character or their shards). Duplicates of maxed characters will be converted to gems instead of character EXP.

The price of pulling have also been changed from 750 to 350 as an adjustment to new rates.

But Nishi, if we are not guaranteed to get a character each pull it will take forever to obtain them!

Well, it should be easier to obtain characters you want, as long as you are lucky enough for the banner to appear, since banners focus on specific characters. On top of that pulls have a good chance of returning part of gems used AND the drop rewards from crates have been boosted to accommodate AND depending on rarity of an achievement they will reward more gems than previously.

I would still love to hear everyone's opinion on this change!

Settings

A bit of a visual update here as well, when hovering over an option, it will display a short description and a screenshot (if applicable) showcasing the change that setting brings visually into the game (thanks Devil for the suggestion!)

CO-OP

Also a requested feature, a CO-OP server list, so you don't need to ask your friend for an IP every time you want to play together!

Also, if you are a lone wolf, there is also an option to disable CO-OP play before you start a new game for that additional peace of mind.

And that's all I want to show for menus, just some main new things I was excited to showcase.

Let's move onto the next part which is...

New grass

Some keen eye might have noticed on the settings screen, that the previously "Use 3D grass" have been changed to a "Grass rendering method" with a "3D+" option. Again, that is probably not the change that is interesting for lower end hardware but I really like it and it's ever so slightly more performant than the old 3D grass (which is not going away btw).

Choosing between 3D and 3D+ is mostly an artistic choice, depending which look you might like more

Both screenshots were taken at max density and render distance. The 3D+ grass has some basic wind simulation too.

At lower settings (especially the render distance), on my hardware the fps difference is about 10 frames, both running at 70-90 range. I might tweak the colors of the 3D+ grass to closer match the 3D one.

Progress?

For the first time, since I started working on 1.6 I have a fully working android build of the game, menus run like butter so the progress is there! Test windows build is on the way too once I get more features ready.

When is 1.6?

It's cooking alright. 

Perks need to be done, story panel is still in the oven. I also want to change the in-game UI with this one too and as you can see, it wasn't touched yet. Unless I decide to move it over to 1.6.1 or something and release the update in parts but that I will decide once the main menu is completed. There aren't many new things that would alter the gameplay yet so perhaps there isn't really much of a reason to rush the release until some gameplay changing stuff is ready to ship.

I would like to hear your thoughts, would you like this update to release in parts? Let me know!