New Music

Up to now, I used a royality free music from the internet but now we have a unique music made for the game by Jake Rizer @jrazer98!

Italian Language

The game (and also the demo) is now available in Italian! Thanks a lot to Gerardo who did the translation for me.

Performance

I tried to optimize performance by adding "pooling". Now, objects are NOT created/destroyed all the time but shown/hidden if they are needed. This is especially important when MANY objects/effects are created like in the this GIF. On the top, you can see that there is a short pause in the gameplay when all effect are created when the 4 novas of the ship strike the enemies at the same time.
On the bottom you see that this does not happen anymore because I never create/delete objects anymore and ALSO the amount of objects is limited by the size of the pool. Be aware that this is an extreme case with all those enemies and 4 novas hitting them at the same time. You'll not find this situation often in normal gameplay. There is one more extreme situation thought: When you have a lot of weapons and slice up many asteroids at the same time. Sometimes FPS dipped down during this situation and now it should be way more fluent. :) Especially for the last stage of the game with many enemies and effects appearing, this should keep the FPS a bit more stable.

Tweaks

• Quest Arrows are now bigger
  
• Tetris collision (from Mr. I and his friends) is now disabled as soon as the quest is completed. This allows to collect boxies which have been (randomly) spawned in front of the huge Tetris block.
  

Bugfixes

• Collected boxies were able to be collected AGAIN (while they fly away) and this could sometimes freeze the game.
• UI could lose focus when opening the pause menu --> options menu while the ship selection was open. In that situation, it was not possible to select any button anymore with the gamepad.
• Achievements did not unlock when the thresholds (e.g. shoot 2048 asteroids) were met in the demo. They should unlock now as soon as you start the game.
• Health points are now "ceiled" which means if you have e.g. 0.3 health, you will see a "1" in the health bar and not "0".
• Lensflare behind station in the cloud vortex is not hidden anymore.
• Tried to fix a shader issue on Mac, where the sun in the cloud vortex had white corners.
• While the list in the end screen is updated, the selection would always jump back to the "chocolate store"-button but now stays even if you have selected "play again" or "main menu"

[ 2024-05-12 17:48:05 CET ] [ Original post ]