The demo version of the game is going to shut down by end of day March 16th. My reasonings are: Generally, when both the full release and the demo of a game are available, the demo is expected to look and feel exactly like the full game (though with limited features, we dont want to be giving the game away for free!) However, the current demo of Solar War is missing some key QOL features that are going to ship in the full release, so it is not an accurate representation of the full game. So, Im going to make the demo unavailable right before I make the full game available. If youve already downloaded the demo, you should still be able to play it. If youre seeing this and still want to download the demo before it goes offline, nows your chance! If youve missed the demo, dont worry! The period between the demo going offline and the full release of the game should be very short (less than a day), so the full game will be available for purchase very shortly, if not now.

Everything coming to Solar War v1.0

Im going to use the remainder of this post to advertise all of the cool things that are coming to Solar War v1.0.

New Solar Systems and Tour Mode

You already know about the one and only Sol. But now, there are 2 new solar systems that you can attempt to conquer!

• Alphy Centauri may appear to be a hospitable binary star system, but the system is actually riddled with annoyances that are sure to ruin your day.
• Epsilloni comes with only 5 main sequence planets along with 50 moons that those planets will release.

You can fight the solar systems individually, or you can fight all of them in the new-fangled Tour Mode, that allows you to hop from system to system!

A bunch of difficulty options

Weve completely reworked the difficulty system. In the demo, there were 4 difficulty options: Relaxed, Standard, Challenge, and Insane Mode. When one was selected, it would set a bunch of variables that control things like how fast planets spawn, how often powerups spawn, what spawns during bosses, etc. Now, you can adjust each of these variables individually. For instance, you may want a high recovery rate, but with 7x planet spawn rate. That option was simply not available in the demo, but it is now! The 4 game modes that were found in the demo can now be considered as presets, where selecting one will still set all of the variables, but will still allow you to tweak said variables as needed. Instead of keeping separate high scores for each difficulty, the game now adjusts your score through a score multiplier (Calculated by advanced witchcraft!) at the end of a run. This means short runs on harder games can now compete with long runs on easier games!

Upgrades, its store, and its currency

Something brand new coming to Solar War v1.0 is the upgrade system. Simply put, the upgrade system is a way to allow players to upgrade The Earth in the middle of a run. Players would do this by entering an upgrade store and spending space rocks acquired from defeating planets on various upgrades (or throwing them to bonus points.) These space rocks can be found in almost every planet, though planets that are harder to defeat tend to have more of them. Defeating bosses, however, will allow the player to acquire a free upgrade. If used "properly", these upgrades can allow The Earth to become overpowered! Unspent space rocks are converted to points automatically at the end of a run.

More Fun Options!

The demo version had 4 Fun Options. This version has 8 Fun Options. We can guarantee you that these new Fun Options are, well, fun. We will say nothing more about them, though.

And a bunch of other things!

I mentioned earlier the QOL features, those essentially fall here. There are a lot of these features, one of which includes the Play Again button, which allows players to start new runs immediately. There are also balancing fixes. We saw that Golden Health is a bit too overpowered; although its health is still the same, the recovery is now lower and no longer will auto-using Needy Health powerups save it. On the flipside, we saw that Lazer was too hard to aim, we reworked it such that it is now simple to aim. The full list is too long to include here. But know that Ive been hard at work!

[ 2025-03-14 15:31:34 CET ] [ Original post ]