Good skies, pilots! As noted in last week’s blog post, this was an abbreviated work week due to the chaos of PAX West, where we had a booth from Friday to Monday (preceded of course by extensive setup and followed by teardown.) It went really well, we think! The 6 PCs we brought were nearly never unused, and we gave away a ton of posters. 🙂 Here’s what it looked like:
Nevertheless, we still managed to squeeze a little bit of goodness into this Friday’s build. First and foremost, all the bugs that were caused in prod by our work on the PAX demo have, to our knowledge, been cleaned up. 😉 Additionally, there is now at least one non-boss enemy in every single territory (except the palace) that can be designated as a “quest target”, and all quest targets now award an additional +30% XP. This will hopefully make killing quest targets feel more rewarding, and also help increase the speed of leveling up in the overworld. Let us know if this feels good or if you feel the XP bonus needs to be larger.
Other changes:
- Dr. Octo only respawns his tail up to 2 additional times.
- Not once at PAX did we see a Bomb Dungeon drop. Ouch! Its drop rate has been increased 4x for enemies in the lowlands. We’ll see if that’s enough.
- The d-pad could only move up/down in the inventory. Now it moves left/right as well. How practical!
- People at PAX seemed to be having trouble overshooting and accidentally diagonalizing when using the thumbstick to navigate their inventory, so now that particular interaction has a substantial dead zone which hopefully helps.
- When you level up your plane, we now show a little popout panel with the changes to your plane’s stats in percentages.
- The little notification panel that displays info about equipped items now appears when auto-equip is disabled, so if you happen to forget what you just did, this’ll remind you.
- “Drop All” command has been renamed to “Drop Trash”, since it doesn’t actually drop all.
- It used to be that you could press the Cancel button in the hangar when first starting the game. This would leave the client frozen. This is no longer allowed.
- Fixed a few cases where new players could accidentally skip the tutorial, only to get it again when they died.
- Sped up the dropship spawn animation in the tutorial; it was so long that it was causing confusion.
- Removed a “dead time” in the normal dropship animation; it would hang for ~4 seconds after animating into position before opening the doors/turning on the lights. This was pretty much just a numbers goof, so we ungoofed it. It can still hang out in this state if there’s some problem with starting the server, but that is rare these days and getting rarer. 🙂 Faster entry into dungeons FTW.
- Fixed a bug where minimap was sometimes becoming invisible.
- We have not logged an incidence of the “super speedy” enemies for a while now. We think we’ve licked it. Tell us if we’re wrong about that!
That’s it for the update! But I hate writing blog posts without including at least one piece of sweet art, and we don’t have any new art in the game this week, so let me instead share our new concept art for the Thief Dungeon! Coming your way in 3D form soon. 🙂
