Because we’re adding a very preliminary friends list! This is just a first cut to work out the UI kinks. So right now friends are very limited! To see your friends (or lack thereof), you just open the inventory menu; they’re like left and right hands. You make a friend by typing “/friend <friendname>”. You can unfriend someone by selecting them in the list…. or by typing “/unfriend <friendname>”. Putting someone on your friends list doesn’t put you on theirs, this ain’t facebook.
On to the limitations, which are numerous! It detects “online” status only based on the server you’re connected to, it can’t tell the difference between a friend being offline or on another server. Also the list is saved locally so if you switch computers the friends won’t come with you. All things we will address! (Also, we know that right now you can’t friend A Coniferous Chair, we’ll fix that and the teleporting issue in the future).
We’ve also spent some time on reducing visual noise!
The heal blast seemed like it was pretty noisy, so we gave it a new look. I think it is super lovely, and at least as functional as before.
The acid cloud has been redone as well, both for noisiness reasons and to sync up the colors of the player effects (more on this later).
The last big visual noisiness changes is that we’ve gotten rid of the little “poof” particles that play when a bullet fizzles after not hitting anything. They looked cool when we added them but it’s not clear they added much in the way of clarity. So as an experiment we eliminated them entirely. We’re curious if folks miss them.
[image where the viewer cannot see that something is missing because you can’t show an absence]
We changed the colors of many of the player specials, to make them fit into these color categories:
- purple: does damage to enemies
- green: heals players
- teal: shields/defense
Hopefully that makes them easier to understand at a glance!
The (great) throne room of Meowza has been filled out with full art for every unit in there (except one? IDK, there are a lot). Now you can see which ones are shielded, cause the shader works on these meshes! Also, the Robo Throne has a few more vulnerable periods which should make it a little more tractable for folks to get some damage credit in. We’re curious how this works out in practice.
Lastly, we’ve done some tweaks to some dungeons to make them feel a little more consistently difficult.
- Crypt of Cathulu
- Mutant Citizens Club
- Reeducation Camp
- Frozen Owl Monastary
That one sentence covers like a lot of content changing so it’s no minor thing. The final boss of the Crypt is substantially more challenging now, so wear your big-kid flight suit.
Thanks for all the great feedback, each and every one of you! Good skies tomorrow!