Hey everyone! it has been quite a while over two years already! While Beat Invaders is a finished project for me, and I continue to work on my new game, Engraving, it is still a project that I love dearly. There were a couple of bugs that bugged me (pun intended) and some things that just broke down with services that I used that were taken offline (Dailies/Weeklies). Originally, I planned to fix those bugs and release a minor patch. But then I had way too much fun! So, this months development time was poured completely into Beat Invaders. If you find new bugs, I would love to hear about them via the in-game Feedback tool or on the Beat Invaders Discord server. I really hope you will enjoy playing the new version of Beat Invaders as much as I did making it!

Beat Invaders 3.0 - Patch Notes

Highlights

• Season 3 started: Leaderboards are fresh and clean - I will post the top scores of the last season in the upcoming days.
• Hyper Lone Wolf game-mode was added: This was requested a couple of times by the community.
  
• Added slight Vertical Movement: General gameplay change - Delivery HQ installed the Convoy Control Protocol into every Ship. This will allow the Ship to gain a bit of vertical movement, which Convoy Freighters will react to. Talented pilots can use this to employ new defensive or offensive tactics.
  
• Route Effect System: Whenever you jump to a new System, you can alter your run by adding Route Effects. These stackable, optional effects will make the game a bit more challenging while offering bigger rewards!
  
• Steam Community Items: Trading Cards, Badges, Backgrounds, and more!
  
• German language: I finished my work on the translation integration and added German as a second language. If you want to play Beat Invaders in your language, reach out on the Discord and help me with the translation!
• Missions menu: In this new menu, you get an overview of your Achievements - and maybe a good idea of what to do on your next run!
• 7 new Achievements!
• Three new Meta Upgrades: You can now equip up to three Hacks, repair your Freighters, and store up to three Specials - very common community requests.
• 5 new in-game Ship Upgrades!

Improvements

• Improved appearance of Upgrade Icons. Added Rarity labels and made Rare upgrades easier to recognize.
• Damage Numbers: With more damage influence from different Route Effects, this helps to get more information about the damage you deal! You can enable it via the options.
• Added Attract mode: This starts the game automatically in demo mode after idling in the main menu; you can enable it via the options.
• Added a Shield display over the health UI when your ship is protected by the Shield provided by Defensive Refactoring.
• Added a template to the Feedback Reporting tools bug section.
• Added Option for low Screenshake; previously, you could only enable or disable it.
• Added Option to confine mouse to the game window.
• Improved Hack Selection screen: Selected Hacks are now easier to recognize, and the layout was rearranged for consistency between screens.
• Improved Options Menu: Restructured to make it easier to navigate and look less cluttered.
• Reworked Dash charge UI element to make it easier to read.
• Clicking/Selecting a profile in the profile selection screen now directly changes to this profile.
• Added Icons to profiles to make it easier to recognize which is active.

Balance

• Increased enemy life with increasing wave count.
• Boss: The Hammer now shoots additional projectiles.
• Meta Upgrade cost becomes more expensive with increasing levels of the upgrade.
• Increased the maximum amount of Dash charges that you can get via in-game Upgrades (3 > 4).
• Added level up options to Evasive Attack (launch 1 additional missile per level, up to 4 in total).
• Immensely buffed damage of Ultrashield shards (400% + bonus based on absorption + wave count bonus).

Bugfixes

• Fixed double inputs with external controller on Steam Deck.
• Fixed broken Daily and Weekly leaderboards, making the achievements available again!
• Fixed bug where additional Upgrade Levels were awarded after loading a game with the Cutting Edge upgrade equipped.
• Fixed typo in Repair Bot description.
• Fixed a bug where "Meta Upgrades" button glow did not update after changing profiles.
• Fixed a bug where "Meta Upgrades" were not sorted correctly.
• Fixed letters in the Upgrade screen appearing in incorrect colors.

It was quite some time since the last patch! I just read in the community forums that dailies/weeklies were broken. This was because I used an external service/api to supply that information to the game. I updated the game to work with a different service now - So dailies and weeklies are now available again! Another small bug that was reported in the community forums was that the screenshake setting is not saved properly - this should now work as intented! There are still known bugs about certain controllers and double inputs. This is unfortunately an engine issue and will be fixed in the next release of it. I will update the game and release another patch as soon as this happens. Hope you enjoy the game! Raffaele

Hey everyone!
I will be showing Beat Invaders on the Game Developer Conference 2023 as a part of the Godot showbooth. I would love to see you there to chat! As part of the preparations for the show, I also implemented a feature that was suggested on the Steam forums, a "Attract Mode". Attract Mode starts after idling in the main menu for about 10 seconds (just the main menu, not upgrade screen or ship select etc.) and is of course an option that you can enable or disable in the game settings. I also added a couple smaller, gameplay/visual updates! The next patch will be coming after the GDC - so in about 2 weeks. By the way:

The game is on 35% discount at the moment, so grab it while the plasma is still hot!

Hey everyone! Patch 2.2.33 was just set live! Thanks to feedback on the Discord and a new way of testing, I found two more bugs in the game that decreased performance on longer runs.

Hey everyone! Patch 2.2.32 was just set live! Thanks to feedback on the Discord, I was made aware of some bugs that I fixed right away .

Patch Notes

• Meteoroids did not get cleaned up properly when leaving the play area, this resulted in auto-acing the Meteoroid event and other issues.
• Spreadshot: Spread upgrade did not display the correctly calculated damage.
• There was a performance problem with the Spreadshot ship class that was leading to decreasing performance on longer runs.

Hey everyone! 2.2.31 was just deployed. It has only minor changes.

Patch Notes

• Meteoroids in higher event waves have received a boost to their health.
• Meteoroids have a damage modifier depending on where on the play field they are.
• Meteoroids no longer damage each other when they overlap.
• Smaller changes to the effects when hitting Meteoroids.

Hey everyone! I just uploaded a new patch! 2.2.3 is mostly a bug fixing and balancing patch, but it also has some new things for you! Thanks again to Hugo from the community for a lot of feedback for this patch and the rest of the community for reporting bugs and problems.

Patch Notes

Balancing was reworked

• All ship classes have adjusted damage output values and should now be competetive! I'm still looking for feedback to adjust balancing in the future, shall there be the need for it.
• Adjusted Hyperbeam damage to wave be useful in higher waves.
• Adjusted Hunterswarm missiles to be useful in all wave counts and have high enough damage to cause chain reactions again.
• Meteoroid health was adjusted to match the new damage output.

Changes

• Coins now come at different colors representing different values. (Gold = 1, Green = 3, Purple = 10)
• Pods: Double Up now changes the appearance of your pods.
• Added a "boost" effect before starting a new wave.
• Added different sound effects for each ship class on the ship select screen.
• Added a new button for "Details" in the Upgrade Screen, now it will be finally usable on a gamepad.
• Changed how a lot of stats are displayed in the detail view (e.g. Ship Speed is now also an absolute value, not just a percentage change)
• Reworked how the Magnet powerup works, it now has a much stronger pull on tokens, but it also can "lose" grip on tokens if they leave the magnet area.
• Railgun Ship class has received an impact effect on Meteroids, making it finally possible to move Meteroids with the Railgun Ship.
• Pulse Blaster: Charge Boost is now Epic rarity
• Spreadshot Ship Class: Main weapon now acts much more like a shotgun and has a increased bullet count by default.
• Certain Graphic Options that had no effect on the Steam Deck are now not displayed anymore when playing on the Steam Deck.

Fixed Bugs

• Destroyed Freighters are now not displayed anymore after continuing a run.
• Run savegames do now properly get deleted on the Steam Deck.
• Some of the new achievements weren't properly awarded, now they work!
• And a LOT more bugs...

Hey everyone! another patch is live and with this patch, there is finally a Demo waiting for you if you haven't yet played Beat Invaders! Another new "feature" is a new trailer - I finally took the opportunity to use some of the footage I collected during the recent patch development to refresh the old trailer. It didn't really do the game no justice anymore. So check it out and let me know what you think in the comments. Let's jump right into the changes!

New Features

Skip Track list

New Special: Auto Tracker

New Upgrade: Pods - Double Up

New Achievements!

Detailed Upgrade Menu Stats

Outline Effect

Tutorials

Changes

Attack Pods manual fire

Automatic Settings on the Steam Deck

Special Info in Upgrade Menu

Repair Special repairs Convoy

Performance improvements!

Rebalancing

Smaller Changes

Bugfixes

Hey everyone! Thanks to Hugo from the Beat Invaders community I was informed about a bug that needed hotfixing. While I was at it, I also took another look into performance issues and optimized performance some more. Because the Spreadshot class had some massive performance issues on very high upgrade levels there was also changes to that ship class. Changes in 2.2.1

• Spreadshot Upgrade: Shot Amount is now capped at lvl. 30
• When Shot Amount is capped, a new Upgrade is unlocked: Spreadshot Damage. This will directly increase the damage of each projectile.
• The time it takes to ramp up Spreadshot: Focus Fire was increased, the time it takes to reset the effect was decreased.
• Spreadshot: Focus Fire now has a visual effect on the projectiles.
• Performance increases.
• Fixed a bug where area damage decreased performance over time.
• Fixed a bug in the Spreadshot Class where sometimes performance would decrease over time.

Hey everyone! With this patch some new features made it into the game.
I knew for quite a while that some runs can really take some time. And there is nothing worse then having to cancel a run just because of running out of time to play.

In-run saving

Profiles (Save Slots)

Tutorials

Performance Boost

Railgun Class rework

• When having an Attack Boost, the charge rate is doubled and the shots are automatically released when fully charged.
• Fire Rate was removed from the Upgrade Pool.
• A new Upgrade was added to the Pool: Discharge (The first hit of the railgun explodes, dealing 30% of the charged damage. - Upgrades increase the explosion size.)
• This Upgrade will also help with horizontal clear speed.

Smaller Changes

• Hyperbeam can now be chained (using a Hyperbeam while a Hyperbeam is active will restart it.)
• Spreadshot Class: Spread Upgrade now also increases Damage.
• A bug was fixed where sometimes it was not possible to use a Repair Bot even though it should have been.
• Smaller bug fixes.

I just deployed another quick patch, it fixes a visual bug that was introduced with the last patch. It also rebalances two things that I was looking into for quite a while. Bugfixes

• Turrets on the destroyer had no Texture and were displayed as white.

• All ships received a slight increase in their base speed.
• Enemy projectiles were slightly slowed down.
• Destroyer turrets now reward an Upgrade Token on destruction (Shield Tower reward three Tokens)
• Destroyer turrets now take longer to reload on normal difficulty

Hey everyone, after seeing some new players play the game live, I noticed that the color of the Upgrade Tokens in game can be very misleading. I changed it to a blue color now and added an additional trail to make it look more like some "energy ball" that you can collect. I hope this change will help new players to not run away from Upgrade Tokens. Also, the upgrade menu between waves was slightly adjusted, pressing two times in the same direction to select an upgrade is no longer an option as it often lead to players choosing an upgrade without reading or even wanting to select the upgrade. Now it is mandatory to press the accept button to select an upgrade - A button prompt was added to the screen. The Upgrade screen was also increased in size to allow for a bigger font size - it was especially small on the Steam Deck. Apart from those changes, a bug was fixed on the Railgun Ship class when the main gun was charging while an Attack Boost was activated. I hope you enjoy the new changes and it's not too confusing for Veteran players! Good luck in your runs! Raffaele

Hey everyone, thanks to everyone that used the feedback feature of the game to send in suggestions and bug reports. It weren't many, but I finally found time to tackle them! Here are the most recent changes:

• Rebalanced the Railgun Class, the charge time is now much more consistent and shorter in higher Charge upgrade levels.
• Increased the width of the Railgun projectile.
• Made the Railgun feel more powerful (sounds and visual effects).
• Fixed a bug when the Convoy was not going to cover behind the player when activating an Attack Boost right after another Attack Boost ran out.
• Slightly reduced the overall glow effect of the game.
• Ship Meta Upgrade cost was overall reduced, some perks were slightly increased in cost - this will reduce the "grind".
• Fixed a translation file error in the Controls menu (rebinding controls popup).

Hey everyone, first of all - sorry for the last days. There were two patches, especially 2.1.4 that were far from perfect and introduced some new bugs. But thanks to user using the new "Feedback" feature, I was able to quickly identify the bugs and patch them. One issue is fixed in this patch: The Drone groups were not "bouncing" off the screen edge anymore. One change is also done to the balancing: Drone groups will now also spawn on easy difficulty. I will try my best to improve the patch quality in the future!

This is a hotfix for a bug that was introduced with yesterdays 2.1.4 patch. The bug caused a crash-to-desktop for a lot of users. I hope you can now enjoy the game again!

After a couple of smaller hotfix patches, here is a patch that introduces a new features and fixes two problems that were reported.

• Game now has a "Feebback" button in the menu - you can send feedback and/or bug reports using this tool!
• Fixed bug: Mouse Position sometimes having an offset after changing resolution/fullscreen settings.
• Fixed bug: Sometimes a wave is not finished because an enemy is stuck off-screen.

Hello Everyone! it has been quite a while since the last patch - I am very sorry about that. This game is a solo developer hobby project of myself and my life has been a bit full lately. Thank you for your support and patience - This patch fixes a lot of bugs, most importantly for the highscore hunters out there: It's now possible to score higher than 2.1 billion. This also meant a migration of the leaderboards. You will probably not notice the change right away as the old scores have been migrated to the new leaderboards, but it could be that a couple of old scores are missing or that some new scores that happened between updating your game to 2.1.0 and the old version are not in the updated game. Sorry about that, but it was a breaking change and I tried to manage it in the best possible way. There are also a couple of new features and a looooot of balance changes! I hope you enjoy the update and have a lot of fun!

Patch Notes 2.1.0

Features and Improvements

• Ship Classes are now Pilots and have received artworks for each.
• New Game Mode: Speedrun Mode (Run ends after wave 40, time is measured)
• New in-game Event: Enemy Destroyer
• Weekly and Daily were changed to Normal Mode (was Hyper) to make it interesting for more players.
• Weekly Mode can now be replayed.
• 6 new Achievements.
• When rolling new Upgrades, there is now a chance to get Lucky Rolls. This will have rare and epic Upgrades. After a boss battle, there is an increased chance for such a roll.
• The delay between dashes has been reduced and the invulnerability time increased - that makes it possible to "chain" dashes to get a longer invulnerability window.
• Players Missile visual size is now dependant of the damage.
• Leaderboard Points are now rounded to the hundreds, that allows much bigger High-Scores. The old values in the Leaderboard were adjusted accordingly.
• Railgun Class: Reworked shooting visual effects.

Balancing

• Attack Boost length decreased from +2s to +1s per level of "Special Power"
• Spreadshot Class: The ships speed was increased slightly.
• Spreadshot Class: Focus Fire upgrade now increases rate of fire instead of decreasing it.
• Railgun Class: Changed Mechanics.
• Railgun Class: Width Upgrade has an improved visual effect and overall increased effect.
• Railgun Class: has a slightly reduced damage bonus against meteoroids.
• Railgun Class: has now a much more fixed overall charge speed to maximum charge only increasing a little bit per charge level.
• Railgun Class: Fire Rate also influences the Time needed for the first charge to load.
• Railgun Class: Charge Speed influences this overall time needed to fully charge, not the time between single charges.
• Railgun Class: The influence of the maximum Charge Level on the rapid fire mode in Attack Boost has been reduced and capped.
• Pulse Blaster Class: Reworked the charge speed of the main weapon (charges faster overall, get's a charge bonus after each 15 levels of Charge)
• Pulse Blaster Class: Amount of Additional Projectiles from Attack Boost is now limited.
• Pulse Blaster Class: The speed reducement from Fire Rate is now applied permanent and not only when firing.
• Pulse Blaster Class: More obvious effect when full charge is reached. This results in a quicker charge up time on higher charge levels and a lower charge speed on lower levels - making the mechanic easier to understand.
• Pod Damage is now increased from the "Pod Salvo" Upgrade (instead of decreased). This should make upgrading the pods much more viable.
• Enemy Transports and Meteors will now spawn together less frequently.
• Enemy Drones will now not appear if there are very few enemies left.
• Enemy Tanks do now shoot with a pre-set delay per row - making the patterns easier to avoid.
• The damage of the Hyperbeam was increased per level of "Special Power".
• Enemy Mine Carriers do now drop a Token and an extra Token if the Mine is destroyed while still attached.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug where sometimes upgrades were re-rolled multiple times when receiving level ups during the upgrade screen is open (most noticeable when the rare sound appears but no rare upgrade is visible)
• Enemy Repair Shield Ship: Fixed a lot of bugs. Now works as intented.
• Fixed a bug with "The Hammer" moving out of the play area.
• The mines in wave 21 were reduced.
• Health of Enemy Cargo Transport was increased in higher wave levels.
• Health of Enemy Cargo Transport Boxes was increased in higher wave levels.
• Damage of Enemy Shooter was increased by 1 per 2 loops (loop 1+2: 1dmg, loop 3+4: 2dmg, etc.).
• Damage of Enemy Artillery was increased by 1 per 2 loops.
• Fixed a bug where multiple Hunterswarm Missiles would hit the same target altough it is already killed.
• Fixed a bug where multiple projectiles were consumed when an enemy was overdamaged.

Hey everyone! Todays patch has mostly bug fixes and a slight difficulty adjustment. One thing that happened in this patch and is still "invisible" are preparations for localization. The first language that will soon be added is German, my native language.

I am looking for people in the community to help with translating the game into their language. If you want to help, contact me on the Discord server!

Changes

• The difficulty of Normal and Lone Wolf mode was adjusted - it is a bit easier on the beginning of a run.
• The increase of the Mine damage was lowered by half. (Was +1 per loop, is now +1 per 2 loops).
• When the game will lose focus (e.g. by Alt-Tabbing out), it will automatically pause during while playing.

Fixes

• The Leaderboards can now display names in non-latin characters.
• The Repair Ship area of effect had a bug in it's visuals.
• The "Bandit's Lucky Coin" was displayed as "Defensive Refactoring" in the Leaderboards. It's now corrected, old registered scores will still display this incorrectly.
• When the last played difficulty was "Lone Wolf", this was not loaded correctly when starting the game.

Hey everyone, sometimes, reality shifts away from a plan. And while you can just accept this and continue, in my case I want to react to these changes. A price increase on an already released game is rather unconventional - Beat Invaders is not an Early Access game where it is much more common to increase the price of the product with added content. And that Beat Invaders is not an Early Access title was, in hindsight, a mistake from my side. I noticed I didn't want to leave the game in the state it was originally released. It wasn't super buggy or boring, but it just felt incomplete to me. So - a lot of the problems have been tackled in 2.0 and I am sure I will continue to add new content to the game as the community and player base grows. But I am at the point where the price of the game does just not represent what a buyer is getting and this puts the game in a bad spot. I have been contacted over and over with opinions that the game is way too cheap. That it can also be received as a low-end product because of the low-end price. As a result of really thinking a lot about it and also talking about the topic with friends - the price of Beat Invaders will be increased. As a player that already bought the game, nothing will change for you - of course!

The price that Beat Invaders is available right now won't be that low in the close future. I just felt it would be fair to write this news before increasing the price to give everyone interested a fair chance to grab it at the current price.

Between mid and end of May, the price for Beat Invaders will be raised - my plan, for now, is $9.99 (7.99 / 6.99)

Hey everyone!

Patch 1.0.83 - Patch notes (Minor Patch)

• Added new System Hack: Bandit's Lucky Coin (increases drop rate of Rare and Epic Upgrades)
• Reworked the Railguns charge visuals to make the charge levels and moment of reaching the maximum charge level easier to see.
• Improved the games loading speed
• Improved the games performance

• Reduced firing rate of enemy Tanks.
• The firing rate of enemies ramps up a bit slower over the course of a run.
• Increased amount of projectiles gained by Pulse Blaster: Charge
• Increased Drop Rate and Max Level of Pulse Blaster: Charge Boost
• Slightly increased Spread of Pulse Blaster's Charged volley.

• Fixed: Another crash bug.
• Fixed: Setting the game to fullscreen will no longer place it on the first screen of a multi-monitor setup.

Hey everyone! There is one request that is brought up over and over: "Friendly fire is annoying" "The game would be better without the freighters" "It's impossible to protect the convoy" I want to give everyone a chance to enjoy the game, so I added a new Game Mode.

Lone Wolf - Game Mode

Debug branch

Patch Notes - 2.0.4

• Optimizations for the Steam Deck (Camera Angle and Position, System Hack selection)
• Change: The Ultrashield Special now charges up with each enemy hit. This increases it's size. After running out, a charged up Ultrashield will release a volley of projectiles.
• Fixed a bug that caused a crash to desktop.
• Fixed a bug where "The Hammer" boss was moving out of the screen.
• Fixed a bug in the Railguns "Overcharge" Upgrade - it now works correctly!

Hey everyone! It was reported that the new 2.0 was crashing on startup on Windows 11. This hotfix solves this problem! Another change that was really important but needs your attention: Cross Platform cloud saves should work now, so switching between your Steam Deck and PC should work. (You have to shut down the game on a platform to have the progress on the other!)

If you have been playing on Windows and the Steam Deck before, please be aware that you now have to choose which Cloud save you want to continue!

Patch Notes - 2.0.2

Hey everyone! After a very intense and long playtest beta it's finally here: 2.0! Originally I planned on calling this version 1.x, but the changes are so big and enormous that it is a new big version.
If you are interested why these big changes were neccessary, you can read this post that goes into the problems of 1.x in more detail.

At this point I want to say a BIG, BIG thank you to the Beat Invaders community on the Discord server. There were a lot of beta versions and a lot of the changes for 2.0 are based on community feedback!

Added Features

• 11 new music tracks by "Approaching Nirvana"!
• Beat Invaders is now officially verified for the Steam Deck!
• One game loop (wave 1-40) is now devided into four Sectors - each with unique color, atmosphere and environment.
• There are now Daily and Weekly challenges with their own respective Leaderboards.
• A new Boss (The Hammer) is waiting for you after Wave 20.
• Around 25 new Upgrades and almost all of the existing upgrades have been completely reworked of new and different upgrades!
• System Hacks are a new gameplay element that let's you customize your Ships sub-systems for some extra unique upgrades.
• Leaderboards now hold more details about Ship Type and equipped System Hacks.
• New Event Wave: Minefield
• New Enemy Type: Spreader Mine
• Steam Rich Presence was added.

Changes

• The games performance was drastically increased, especially with a lot of projectiles on screen - And there WILL BE more projectiles on screen!
• Visibility of enemy projectiles was improved.
• The Ship Classes were rebalanced and partially reworked.
• Ship Class: Pulse Blaster was strongly reworked and received the Charge mechanic.
• Ship Class: Pulse Blaster Piercing was reworked.
• Leaderboards are now separated by Easy, Normal and Hyper.
• Upgrades now come in different rarity levels: Common, Rare and Epic.
• Upgrades now can have preconditions - Some Upgrades will only be added to the pool after other upgrades were unlocked.
• Completely reworked gamepad rumble.
• Repairing your ship during wave changes now works differently than before using Repair Bots.
• Specials now have a separate slot and can be activated manually by a dedicated Button. The Special mechanic was hugely reworked.
• Tank Type Enemies now shoot two diagonal projectiles.
• Meteoroids have been rebalanced in a lot of ways.
• Upgrade Tokens collected during a run now work differently - instead of purchasing upgrades you earn levels. Per level you can purchase one Upgrade.
• Dashes now feature charges that can be increased during a run.
• Almost all Upgrades have been reworked - All effects are now MUCH more impactful and you will feel the upgrades from the first point invested.
• Friendly fire was strongly reduced. But you can also equip the IFF System Hack and have no friendly fire at all.
• Increased Meta Upgrades upgrade cost.
• Enemies gain more health over the course of a run.

New Upgrades, Unlocks, Specials and Hacks

• Evasive Salvo
• Attack Pod Salvo
• Convoy Freighter Replace
• Convoy Freighter Turret
• Convoy Freighter Turret Fire Rate
• Specials Plus
• Micromissiles Area Damage
• Micromissiles Damage
• Dash Charge
• Pulse Blaster: Capacitor
• Pulse Blaster: Charge Boost
• Railgun: Overcharge
• Spreadshot: Combinator
• Spreadshot: Focus Fire
• Hunterswarm Launcher
• Repair Bot
• System Hack: Code Profiling
• System Hack: Cutting Edge
• System Hack: Overcharged Accelerator
• System Hack: IFF Modulator
• System Hack: Defensive Refactoring
• Special: Supermagnet
• Special: Ultrashield
• Special: Ship Repair

Fixes and smaller Changes

• Unlocking multiple unlocks in one run will now work correctly.
• Convoy Freighters now move out of the way more effectively.
• Hyperbeam: damage reduced, tick rate increased
• Attack Boost: does not make the player invunerable anymore.
• Attack Boost: causes Freighters to move out of the way to avoid friendly fire.
• Attack Boost: time was reduced from 15 > 10 seconds.
• Enemy Transport ships will now go from left to right some times.
• The last used Ship will now always be selected for the next run.
• The ingame camera is a bit more dynamic.
• Added button hints for Dashing and Specials.
• Reworked the Credit screen.
• Added a savegame backup feature.
• Added a fullscreen and borderless fullscreen feature (mostly to fix fullscreen problems in certain Linux distributions).
• Added acoustic feedback when changing the volume sliders.
• Using Esc / B now exits all menus correctly.
• And a TON of more bugfixes.

Hey everyone! Today I want to share some of the new features and changes that will come to the 2.0 update that will come to Beat Invaders soon.

One important thing before we get to the meat and potatoes.

Challenges before 2.0

The game is too easy. [/olist] Of course there are also some bugs, balance issues and general feature wishes - I will talk about those in the last section of this post.

Runs are too similar

This seems like one of the main problems - and I totally agree. Beat Invaders was not planned as a big game where you could sink hundreds of hours - that is also reflected in the price. But I still think runs should feel individual and offer suprises. But what makes a run different from another? In my opinion it comes down to two things: Opportunities and importance of decisions.

Ingame Upgrades

At the current version, upgrades are purchased during a run by paying for them with collected tokens. After each wave you are offered three random upgrades. Each upgrade has a base cost of 3 Tokens and the price is increased by each purchased level per upgrade. This results in less decision making because a good player earns so many tokens that, most of the time, all three upgrade choices can be purchased. Also cheap upgrades can just be picked up due to the low price at a later point when the player earns much more Tokens in a run than in the beginning. This design will be overhauled in 2.0. In 2.0 each Token that is picked up will act as an experience point and fill up an experience bar towards the next level. The way the Tokens act as a currency in the Meta Upgrade Menu will not be touched, but more on that later. When you earned a level up, you will be offered three random upgrade options (just like before) and can select one of those per level up. After selecting that upgrade, the offered options will instantly be rerolled. So you have to make a decision which of the three you are going to pick up.
Experience levels will also be earned much faster in the beginning of the game to help you get much quicker into the action than before! Another change to the run upgrades are that there are just many new options, some of those have preconditions that must be fulfilled for them to be added to the upgrade pool. Speaking of the upgrade pool - Upgrades now also have a rarity attached to them with a higher or lower chance for them to be offered as one of the three upgrades.
The new Dash Charge, Evasive Attack or Ship Health upgrades (just examples of new upgrades that will be included) will appear with a lower chance than e.g. Ship Speed. The main weapon upgrades are now also more individual to each ship class. Some upgrades will also have negative impacts and need to be carefully considered. For example, the Fire Rate upgrade for the Blaster class will slow your ship down while firing. This can of course be countered with increasing your ship speed - But it's not as much of a "no-brainer" as it was before. In the current version, it takes quite some time until your ship can feel really powerful and some upgrades are really only noticeable after a couple of upgrades. This will also change a lot in 2.0! As you could quickly rack up certain upgrades before (due to the option to purchase multiple upgrades per wave) I had to balance them to a pretty high level - Level 20 was the "soft cap" for ship upgrades. In 2.0, the soft cap is at Level 10. That results in each upgrade having a much more noticeable effect. Another change will be made to the way you can heal up your ship. Right now you can purchase ship heals as part of the normal upgrade pool. This lead to an interesting choice for players as you know the price for the heal will increase with every purchased heal. I liked that idea of limited supplied for heals but I still didn't like the idea of healing as an upgrade. Healing was now moved to a separate Ship Module, purchaseable in the Upgrade Menu: The Repair Bot.
This can be used once per charge in-between waves. The amount of charges can be increased to a certain point via the Upgrade Menu, but you can also get additional charges as upgrades form the upgrade pool (but they are rare, so it can be a tough choice). Eventually, Repair Bots will also be dropped in-game, but I am not sure on that at the moment. The beta test will solve the decision for sure.

Menu Upgrades

The Upgrade Menu design was already overhauled in 1.0.8 - and the reason behind it was mostly preparations for 2.0! In general, the way the Upgrade Menu works won't be changed, you will still get the Tokens you earned in-game as a currency outside of the game to purchase upgrades in the Upgrade Menu. In 2.0 you will get more options for upgrades and those upgrades will sometimes have preconditions. So you will only be able to purchase e.g. the new upgrade Hunterswarm Launcher if you have Dash and Missiles upgraded. This will help new players to not be overwhelmed with choices in the beginning and give more seasoned players unlocks to work towards.

Ingame Specials

If you already played Beat Invaders a little bit you probably noticed that sometimes you can shoot a fat Laser Beam (known as the Hyperbeam) or get an Attack Boost that will increase your Fire Rate and make you invulnerable. Right now these additional Skills known as Specials are automatically activated on pickup. This lead to some frustration with players picking up a Hyperbeam just for it to be wasted on the last two remaining enemies. In a past Update, this behaviour was changed so the Hyperbeam was only fired when you pressed the fire button - but it could still lead to frustrating moments when there are two enemies left and you have no other way of getting rid of them but to fire. This whole system will be overhauled and expanded. In 2.0 you will get a new, dedicated button to activate Specials that you picked up. In the lower right corner of the screen there will be an icon, showing you if you have currently a Special picked up that is ready to use.
Your ship can only hold one Special at a time. So you sometimes need to choose to use your Special at a certain time to pick up a new one or actively decide to let a new Special pass your ship to keep your current Special for later use. There will also be some new Specials and the current two specials are overhauled a bit. New Specials include a two-bar Heal, an Invunerability Shield, a Token Pickup Magnet and maybe more!

And more!

You can look forward to new Event Wave types, new Enemies, and new Encounters that will spice up each run!

World Progression

In 2.0, the game will be split up into four Sectors:

• Novis Alpha
• Aeris Station
• Tartarus Colony
• Nox Nebula

Each Sector will feature a unique appearance and, if everything works out on a different aspect of 2.0 (eventually there will be a cool suprise), a unique playlist. Sector 2, Aeris Station, will also feature a new boss encounter at the end of the Sector - So fighting your way into the Tartarus Colony won't be easy! The goal for the future will be to have one boss encounter at the end of each Sector - but this will take a little longer and I am looking forward to have more cool content updates for the future! I hope this change will give you the feeling of progressing and moving through a universe instead of just being stuck in a long, uniform tunnel.

Difficulty Level

At the moment, the difficulty level seems too easy for a lot of you. I hope to improve this with a balancing changes. Those will include a rebalance of certain ship class upgrades, e.g. adjusting the overall power of the Spreadshot class. But it will also include rebalancing enemy health and aspects like player health from the upgrade menu. Playing a bit rewards enough Upgrade Tokens to upgrade Player Health to pretty crazy values. This in combination with the ingame heal/repair Upgrades can be enough to make the ship very tanky - to the point where you can just take hits and don't need to really care a lot about it. This will be tackled by introducing a cap to this upgrade in 2.0 - You will still be able to upgrade your ships maximum health via rare ingame Upgrades - but this will level the playground for players to stop the "grind" to a bigger and bigger high score. Another balancing change will change how the prices in the Upgrade Menu work. They will have an exponential growth in their price from upgrading them and will also increase the prices of all other upgrades. That will result in having to think more which upgrade to get at which point to get the best out of your Upgrade Tokens. Some of the Upgrades will also receive ingame Upgrade counter-parts to further enhance the ability - for example: the Dash ability now works using charges. These charges can be increased to a maximum of three with rare in-game Upgrades to give you more manouverability. You can get the first charge and unlock the ingame Upgrades via the Upgrade Menu. Further charges will only appear in-game. A balancing change to enemies will include just buffing them more regulary with more health as sometimes, waves were evaporated in mere seconds, especially in higher levels. The ship classes will also get some more changes.
The Pulse Blaster class was often seen as the weakest one because of the single shot. Even though Piercing is a powerful upgrade - it just couldn't cut it against the Spreadshot class or the insane penetration and crazy rate of fire on an Attack Boosted Railgun class. The Pulse Blaster class will get an overhaul of the Width upgrade, now called Charge. The Ship already starts with a Charge Level of one - meaning when you will not fire, your main weapon will charge up and fire more projectiles when you release the trigger. This can be further upgraded to fire more projectiles, charge up quicker or make them more powerful when fully charged. There are also epic Upgrades that will make the Blaster class a ship to be taken serious when compared to the Spreadshot class. The Railgun class is another class that was often overlooked - of course it will also receive some more balancing changes and powerups. And an epic Upgrade that will give the ship offensive capabilities while charging up the main weapon - which is something many considered as a "too-big" trade off to play the class.

Feature requests, Bugs, General things

Of course, a lot of other things will be changed, too. A lot of those have been requested in the community. One of the most requested features was the Global Leaderboard. In 2.0, the High Scores menu will feature a new global top score board. I thought about this for quite a while, but at this point I am sure it will benefit all players. The performance in general will get a big boost, especially in the late game when a lot of bullets are on the screen - I completely refactored how bullets are handled in the game and it allows for much, much more stuff going on without any performance hit.

And of course: THANK YOU for all the reports here on Steam and on the Discord.

It really helps to identify those problems and most of the reported bugs are either already patched or will be patched in 2.0 - I hope you have a little more patience for some of the problems (Meteoroid waves, Fullscreen in some Linux distributions and some more).

Closing words

This was quite a long post - but still not everything has been said about 2.0! There are still some really cool things waiting to be talked about or shown off. I hope you are as excited as I am. And again: There will be a beta test and if you are interested in taking part it would be best to join the Discord Server! Follow the link in the game or just click here.

Hey everyone!

Patch 1.0.83 - Patch notes (Minor Patch)

• New players will now receive an Attack Boost when starting a new game.

• Fixed: Meteoroids came in way too fast in Meteoroid waves.
• Fixed: When enemies managed to get past the player and convoy, the game sometimes stayed in a stuck state.

Hey everyone!

If you are actually reading this, let me know in the comments:

Patch 1.0.8 - Patch notes

• Controls menu - you can now reconfigure your controls.
• Redesigned upgrade screen - easier to navigate and read; and plenty of space for future additions.
• Pulse Blaster Ship Class: the weapon now charges up when not shooting, the level of charging will be increased by the "Blaster Charge" upgrade.
• Convoy Freighters will not receive friendly fire on Easy Mode.
• VSync option has been added to the Options menu.
• Enemies will no longer damage the player when leaving through the bottom of the game area.
• Music is now paused (and not just muted) in the pause menu.

• Attack Pods: Are now much more efficient in higher upgrade levels.
• Ship Class Railgun: The Railgun will deal additional damage against bigger targets.
• Ship Class Railgun: The Railgun will deal additional damage while rapid-firing in Attack Boost mode with additional Max Charge upgrades.
• Pulse Blaster Ship Class: Penetration upgrades will deal additional damage to bigger targets.
• Hunterswarm Missiles (Drone Group Missiles): the missiles will deal additional damage with increasing wave count.
• The frequency of Drone Spawns has been increases on higher wave counts.
• Boss: shorter downtimes, quicker attacks, bigger and faster movements.
• Sniper enemies: Charge up faster in Hyper Mode and after the first loop.
• Meteoroids: Health increases much more on increasing wave count.
• All enemies: health increases quicker with increasing wave count.
• All enemies: lowered base hp on some bigger base enemies.
• All enemies: projectiles become faster after the first loop.
• All enemies: projectiles become faster after the first loop.
• Capped the amount of maximum Boxes on a Transport Ship.
• Meteoroids: reduced pushback on increasing wave count.

• Fixed: Meteoroids flying away from the player on high wave counts.
• Fixed: Meteoroids went too far away to fight.
• Fixed: the player lost the multiplier during a Boss fight.
• Fixed: Convoy Freighters behaved incorrectly after and/or before a Boss fight.
• Fixed: the Ship Class icons in the ship selection screen were not correctly updated after a run.
• Fixed: the Player Ship was still glowing in the ship selection screen after a run.
• Fixed: Attack Pod and Missiles upgrades were not shown in the Upgrade Icons on the side.

Hey everyone!

Patch 1.0.7 - Patch notes

• Added the Multiplier decay - The Multiplier will now degrade over two seconds.
• Pressing 'B' / 'Square' on the gamepad now skips the upgrade screen.
• The rumble setting in the options menu now works like intented.
• Meteroids now can't exit the play area anymore.
• Drones will not exit the play area and will also always spawn inside the play area.
• On Easy Mode, it will take longer before the first Drone or Meteroid waves appear.
• Performance was increased a bit overall.

• Ship Class Pulse Blaster: The main weapons "Penetration" upgrade will now deal bonus damage to Meteroids based on its level.
• Ship Class Spreadshot: The main weapons homing ability was removed.
• Ship Class Railgun: The main weapons charging is now more obvious and emits a distinctive sound when fully charged. The railgun will also deal bonus damage to Meteroids.
• Ship Class Railgun: The beam width was increased.
• Shielder Enemies will take longer to recharge their shield skill.
• Optimized the homing capabilities of Micro Missiles and Hunterswarm Missiles
• A Meteroid will take longer to destroy itself on ramming things.
• The players Convoy Freighters will be able to apply much more pushback the a Meteroid

• Fixed a bug where Meteroids rammed each other, sometimes resulting in Meteroids flying outside the play area.
• Fixed a bug where Convoy Freighters did not get their upgrades after the Boss fight.
• Fixed a bug where Drone Waves were over before all drone groups were taken down.
• Fixed a bug where the Railguns ship was sometimes not hitting correctly.

Hey everyone!

Patch 1.0.5 - Patch notes (Minor Patch)

• Fixed a bug where an avoided Meteroid caused the game to not spawn the next wave.
• Fixed a bug where the game over screen caused problems or crash the game.

Hey everyone!

Patch 1.0.4 - Full patch notes (Minor Patch)

• Added a checkbox to the Option menu to swap the Fire and Dash buttons on Controllers
• Improved the behaviour and efficiency of the Micro Missiles.
• Slightly improved the efficiency of Hunterswarm Missiles (the ones that are spawned when a Drone group is eliminated)
• Added a small delay before the shot of an Enemy Shooter

• Fixed a bug where the Analog Stick won't work in the Upgrade screen.
• Fixed Drones that spawned during the Upgrade screen.
• Fixed the difficulty buttons having multiple selections after starting the game.
• Fixed a bug where the entered name was not added to the local high score or the name input field was not shown after a run.
• Fixed a bug where a Meteroid was instantly removed when touching the Player or a Convoy Freighter.
• Fixed a problem with the "Traitor" Achievement.
• Fixed a bug with the Hyperbeam: It shot too early the first time when picked up and Shoot was held down.
• Slightly reduced the Micro Missile shot volume.

Hey everyone!

Patch 1.03 - Full patch notes

• Reworked all Upgrade Progressions! Upgrades now give a much bigger boost early on while later upgrades provide a smaller increase of power.
• Improved gamepad support; You can now use the analog sticks to play and navigate menus.
• The Hyperbeam is now manually controlled. When charged, activate it by shooting.
• Reworked how the Token Magnet works, it should now pull the coins in much more efficient.
• The option to show your last runs result from the High Score menu has been added.
• Gamepad Rumble was added; This can be deactivated in the Options menu.
• Meteroid Events will now have an early game and early player adjustment.
• Drones will now not be killed at the end of a wave.

• Added a warning sound when a Convoy Freighter is hit by friendly fire.
• ESC (B/Circle on the controller) will now go back from all menus.
• The game is now muted when the game windows is not focused.
• Waves end quicker when all enemies have been killed.

• Fixed a bug where Upgrade Tokens that were collected while being in the Upgrade menu not made the prices update.
• Fixed a bug with the 30k Achievement being unlocked too early.
• Fixed a bug that caused the camera to get stuck after leaving the Upgrade Menu between waves.
• Fixed a bug where the camera got stuck after an upgrade screen.