Hello everybody! I'm very excited to announce that version 0.8 is finally ready, featuring a lot of new content and improvements!

Bots!

Version 0.8 introduces Gauntlet Mode, a variant of Junk Attack where you face off against a series of bots, each one more difficult than the last. Pick a loadout and get ready for an intense fight against a brutally efficient AI. Can you survive enough rounds and earn enough points to climb to the top of the mode's leaderboard?

Profiles

Profiles allow you to customize the menus and save your cursor settings both locally and on the Steam Cloud. If you save a profile in your copy of the game and join another player's Remote Play session, your profile will automatically appear, allowing you to use your profile no matter whose game you're playing! Profiles can be accessed by going to "Extras" from the main menu.

Balance Changes

The difficulty curve in Classic Mode has been changed: the score threshold for difficulty 20 is still 1,000,000 points, but the earlier difficulties are progressed through much faster. The actual formula for each threshold was changed from (difficulty)^2 * 2500 points, to (difficulty)^3 * 125 points. Several of Junk Attack's loadouts were tweaked or completely reworked based on feedback from playtesting. Part of the reason why I'm so excited about the addition of bots is that anyone can now use these loadouts when playing solo, so I am looking forward to hearing what players think!

Full Patch Notes

Aside from the above, there are many more additions and changes in version 0.8, which I have listed below, as well as more specific details about what was already described.

Gauntlet Mode

• Added a new game mode where a single player faces off against an AI player using a variation of Junk Attack's rules.
• A new Steam Leaderboard exists for Gauntlet Mode, where players are ranked by the highest round they reached, with scores breaking ties.

Profiles

• Players can personalize the appearances of some menus by using custom colors and patterns instead of the usual green, blue, red and pink for players 1-4 respectively.
• You can also save your cursor settings in your profile, which is handy for associating them with specific users rather than player numbers.
• If you join another player's Remote Play Together session, your profile will be loaded in their game, so you can take your preferences on the go.

Classic Mode

• The difficulty thresholds have been adjusted: instead of (difficulty)^2 * 2500 points, it is now (difficulty)^3 * 125 points (note that the threshold for difficulty 20 is still 1,000,000 points).
  • This results in every difficulty below 20 having a lower threshold (the lower the difficulty, the more drastic the reduction is).
  • This decision was made to prevent the game from being stale when starting at low difficulties.

Junk Attack

• New ability which is part of a couple of reworked loadouts: Transfer Spree.
  • For a limited time, all junk hit by projectiles is transferred instead of shattered.
• The following loadouts have been reworked based on feedback from playtesting.
  • Bomb Proof: first and second abilities are cheaper.
  • Queue Assault: the second and third abilities no longer rely on each other to be powerful.
  • Sabotage: a nearly complete redesign to make each ability more impactful and give users a way to top-out their opponents.
  • Petrification: the loadout still revolves around filling opponents' boards with tiny junk, but the gimmick of having an expensive first ability has been ditched in favor of abilities with more typical costs.
• If releasing the bomb button will activate a Transfer Bomb, the outline shown has an alternate appearance.
• The default time between difficulty increments was changed from 45 seconds to 30 seconds (the player can still select their own value like before).
• The game tracks some extra stats such as the number of abilities used.
• When junk is transferred, a fade-out animation plays instead of the junk instantly vanishing.
• The alerts when targeted by Junk Transfers are less spammy (one alert for the whole ability instead of for each junk piece).
• Some more complex abilities now have summaries in the ability info menus which do a better job describing them than the auto-generated details.
• With the exception of Transfer Sprees, if a timed ability is applied while the same ability is already active, the new ability's duration is added to the timer instead of replacing the old timer value.

Extras

• The Chemical junk theme has a new shader effect to mimic caustics.
• The Fluid debris theme was redesigned to better fit the game's aesthetic.
• The Bitcrushed sound effects pack was reworked to use the block-break sound from the Sega Genesis version.
• The animations used for the game's new trailer can be viewed in game, which is how they were generated for the trailer in the first place!

Menus

• The game now lets you know when you unlock new extras.
• You can now hold left/right to move sliders instead of needing to do individual taps.
• Player stats screen: progress bars now measure the progress between zero and the next milestone, instead of the progress between the previous and next milestones (which looked confusing).
• When clicking on the loadout/player select buttons in the loadout selection menu, the game now detects if you clicked on the left side and will cycle backwards in that case (it was confusing for it to always cycle forwards even when clicking the left chevron).
• All menus now treat mouse events as coming from the first player using the keyboard, previously some menus treated them as always coming from player 1.
• Meter segment numbers in the loadout info menus stand out more.

Bug Fixes

• It is no longer possible to do a frame-perfect swap to move a block which is falling.
• Hold-to-swap controls are no longer buggy at the edges of the board.
• Fixed a memory leak when starting a new game (which was fortunately very minor - for the leak to consume a single kilobyte of RAM, you'd need to play 32 singleplayer games in a row).
• A rare bug whereupon first boot the game would open in a minimum-size window instead of fullscreen has been fixed.
• Ability durations with decimal values are now parsed correctly instead of truncated to seconds.
• Particle trails (such as the Fluid debris theme) get smaller towards the tail, as they were originally intended to.
• The "GAME OVER" graphic is no longer visible above the board at the beginning of the animation in 4 player games.
• Fixed a bug where Speed Up abilities could prevent the difficulty increase over time from working.
• Fixed a memory leak which occurred upon exiting the tutorial at certain stages of it loading its animations.

Music

• Music fades out when returning to the menus from the game instead of instantly cutting.
• The number of times each song is played is balanced across the entire session (app startup to shutdown) instead of only being balanced within each game played.