Heeeeeereee’s what’s new!
We’ve given a makeover to the carriers that transport your planes to dungeons and the Rebel City. It’s something that we see a lot so it should look great! We’re also responding to feedback that the previous progress indicators were unclear, and that the dropship was sitting in front of things like loot. Now it has this lovely teleport animation where you can see interior structures, and it rises from below so it’s always below the field of battle. The numbers on the front count down how long it’ll remain open.
We’ve improved the appearance of the dungeon “lore spots”. Now they fade in unobtrusively below the action.
And there’s now art for every unit in the Imperial Palace! (that’s highmountains for those who have been with us long enough to know the code) This made a pretty big change in the feel of the area, check it out!
And Pharaoh has a new look! It’s bigger, and buggier!
The Merlin appeared to be a bit overpowered in some circumstances, so we’ve made a few changes to rein it in. The wipe effect is smaller, and increases in cost faster, so the low end you can pretty much only protect yourself but have lots of chances, while on the high end you have a decent radius but it’s expensive. We’ve also cut the recharge rate of steam engines to avoid being able to wipe too often, or repeatedly warp forever. These changes are a bit intentionally dramatic, because we’re not sure if they’ll even make things better. This is an experiment that we’re still actively looking at. Please let us know your experience!
We fixed the bullet-related issues found in last week’s FF. Untiered weapons should be usable again! Also, some of the guns that still had big bullets, like the Strike weapons and the duster’s trail, got the shrinky treatment.
The shield shader was tweaked to amplify the fresnel effect, so you see them more strongly at the edges and less strongly on the front faces. It makes bosses look better, and should still be clearly “on”.
We’ve made changes to Temple of Ra and Cancer to make them more challenging to fight.
Remaining changes:
- Some player guns tweaked for appearance
- Minibosses need to be killed in most dungeons to unlock the areas behind; no more high-HP destructible walls.
- HP of various bosses buffed (thanks for the feedback!)
- Temple of Egg now has anti-rushing destructible walls.
- You can now see when other players are “chilling” (which is our term for standing still to chat or access inventory)
- Unusable missile weapons no longer drop; if you have any in your cargo or storage, they will disappear.
- Dim Ally Bullets option now defaults to false.
Thanks to all of our Friends for helping us iterate on Steambirds!