It’s been a piping hot week here at Spry Fox, let’s see what we’ve been cooking up.
The Laser Playground has brand new background art assets to fit the theme of a disquieting gameshow. It’s not pink, that’s just the excitement pumping in your eyeballs.
We have a new notifications system for item pickups. Our goal here is to make the information be clearer, and stick around for a bit longer, so you can understand what you just picked up. It has a system that displays a mini summary, like +DPS or -Cooldown.
We’ve done a balancing pass over some of the weapons and classes, based on our observations of their power. Colombos have had their damage boosted by 25%, and Tripleshot (blaster) reduced by 20%. The Hog has 10% more armor and 10% less damage, and the Walker does 10% less damage.
Menu navigation has been overhauled and made user-bindable, for both keyboard and gamepad (and I guess mouse, if that’s what you’re into). By default, WASD navigates the menus and J, K are the menu buttons. However we stop using those keys for navigation when you’re typing in a text field, for obvious reasons. At such times you have a plethora of other options: Arrow keys, Tab & Shift-Tab, and Return/Enter. The idea is that we’ll make it as easy as possible to not move your fingers from playing position when possible, and fall back to sensible defaults otherwise.
For gamepads, it’s a similar story: the left stick, the dpad, and the right stick all navigate the menus as you’d expect and the face buttons do menu button duty. We’re going with the US-style “confirm is the bottom button”. Metal Gear fans who’ll be instinctively reaching for that circle will be … confused.
There is a new Menu section in the control bindings. It takes the place of the old Inventory section, because these are now the same. We have declared the inventory to be a menu; it is spoken.
Also some of the bug reporter brokenness was fixed!
More things:
- All player planes now have the nice blurry propellers.
- Small tweaks to tutorial.
- Potential fix, and some logging, for the sped-up-units bug.
- Raptor mine damage doubled, because there was a bug before that made us think it was doing twice as much damage as it actually was.
- Speech bubbles from enemies got a small tweak. They are no longer purple.
- Sweeper, Pulser, Blood Scalpel have new art.
- Old Faithful shield visuals now work again.
- The untiered weapon “Jumbo” has been removed. We’re cleaning house a bit.
- The following untiered weapons have been tweaked for your pleasure:
- Spring Dragon
- Blood Vortex
- Moon Laser
- Undertaker
- The Spitting Cat
- Last Smoke
Hope everyone has good skies this week, and thanks for the feedback and bug reports!