The Ruined City units now have more apt names! Goodbye Sand Cat, hello Rubble Cat.
The Pharaoh gets the fire gun on its apex back again. We missed ya, big guy! (typoed that as “bug guy”, which is equally apt when you think about it) The fire gun provided an essential escalating tension as you fought your way through the pyramid from bottom to top.
The Towers of Ra that spawn randomly are smaller, making for more of a bite-sized foreshadowing, and the (huge) Temples of Ra now spawn little harasser bugs. It should make for a more varied experience.
The Ambassador’s bullet patterns towards its final phase are more interesting. This boss has always entertained me, it moves so slowly it’s almost lazy. A lazy graceful ballet by a haughty staring half-destroyed statue face. But it makes this sunflower of death thing that makes it challenging to get in there and deal damage. Now it’s hopefully a little more so.
Poison God has a final phase “with invincible long body”. We’re putting that phrase in all our advertisements, lemme tell you what.
The Hospital Area, Robot Factory, Egyptian Dig, and Dog Base backgrounds have gotten the environment once-over. Now they have pleasingly different elevations, and the rock formations combine into pleasing shapes. Plus the Dog base has these kickin’ pillbox tower walls that are totally distinctive.
Eye dungeon unit art have been given a tweakin’. Whispering in your ear: this game looks good
Work on the quest system continues apace.
– Store quests so you can logout or change servers and keep your quests
– Record a player’s quest history so you can unlock new quests (coming later) or add restrictions to replaying a quest (like a delay)
– Quests are processed on the server but the client is kept in the loop
– Add a kill quest type, in addition to the existing collection goal type
– Quests can optionally be automatically-completed (instead of the need to return to a quest-giver) or automatically-assigned (like tutorial quests)
This is an important phase because it’s about us pushing the limits of the system and learning what it’s good for, and where we want to spend engineering time making it better. We know we want to build out the UI and have quest givers, but also we need to make sure we have enough power in the system to add meaningful content via quests.
We fixed a silly but major issue with the bullet firing optimization from last time. It turned out that instead of using ‘continue’ to skip players who didn’t have any bullets to fire, we were instead doing a ‘return’ which skipped all other players. Simple mistake to make, hard one to see even if you’re looking right at it. This is now fixed and bullets are looking extremely solid even in intense situations.
There was an issue where gifs were uploading twice. Now they only upload once. Once is enough.
We’ve been building some further optimizations as well, but those haven’t been deployed so they’ll have to wait for the next blog post!
Good skies, everyone!