Bugfixes

• Buffs, projectiles and category "none" items are no longer show up in the "count" when you get a rarity based global buff.

• Crossbows play their animation properly with the Marksman skill now.

• Rarity based buffs should no longer show up on buffs.

• Group multipliers should now be properly calculated when you load a savefile in.

[ 2025-06-26 21:47:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi there!

I've been working on a pretty large update for the Steam Summer Sale, and welp here it is!

Weapon Changes

Changed black hole to give the base damage boost whenever a gem gets applied to it. This should make it way less confusing to use.

Flipped the directions of every weapon horizontally, so they actually point in the starting direction.

Donut gives a 4x damage multiplier instead of a 2x one.

Cleaver no longer removes bleed after attacking and does 2.0x more damage per bleed instead of 1.5x

Hammer does 5.0x more damage instead of 3.0x when the sphere has broken armor on it.

Base damage global buffs now evenly split the damage boost between each hit of the weapon. This means that additional base damage will have an equal effect on both single and multi-hit weapons. This change doesn't include the gems, or projectile buffs.

Banana is now epic rarity instead of rare.

New Weapons

• Added Pizza roller (epic, shortblade)

• Added Beach ball (uncommon, object)

• Added Spiky ball (common, heavy)

• Added Fish (rare, food)

• Added Crossbow (legendary, bow)

• Added Orange Gem (legendary, gem)

[img src="https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images/45479047/1f9ce83cfdec25be70cc53ca9e1ed1f0820ae30e.png"][/img]

New Buffs

• Added buff strength, which buffs the effectiveness of item buffs like the donut or the dice.

• Added base damage and multipliers that affect a certain rarity.

[img src="https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images/45479047/b82a4eb7c902e8ef5c92e407eac7a301cb94750d.png"][/img]

Projectile Changes

Nerfed projectile buff values (strength, power) to be less ridiculous.

Changed stat ramping to be slower for projectiles that appear in the shop.

Final Blow buff is now a percentage increase to projectile count rather than a flat one. Also nerfed the values a bit so they aren't ridiculous late game.

Changed rounding function on the stat ramping to have more "in-between values".

Increased the base damage of every projectile type by 2x.

Increased the base damage of falling projectiles by roughly 3x.

New Projectiles

• Added a new projectile that applies weakness to the sphere. (next weapon hit deals +10% more damage)

• Added a new projectile that spawns a ring of fire. It deals the projectile's damage (with buffs) every 0.25s for 3 seconds if the sphere is overlapping.

[img src="https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images/45479047/a0ad7bb453d09778f016602c704bd0de516340d6.png"][/img]

New Feature

Fight speed selector allows you to pause the fight, slow it down to half speed, or speed it up to 2x or 3x as fast. This should allow people to do runs faster or to see how much damage a weapon does.

speeding up can cause inaccurate results on lower end hardware, especially if there are a lot of projectiles!

[img src="https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images/45479047/2686a27469d6669b4bb89bf3b518716cd1e80894.png"][/img]

Minor Changes

• Changed the fire effects to be more red rather than yellow.

• Renamed "on destroy" to "on spawn" in projectiles to reflect what it does more clearly.

• Irrelevant stats on certain projectile combinations are now hidden.

• A single hit from a projectile can now appear as the highest damaging weapon in the main menu.

• Increased the font size of objectives to make them more readable on the Steam deck.

• Added new playtesters to the credits

Optimizations

• Group multipliers are now cached. This should significantly reduce stuttering during fights and when moving weapons around in the deck in late-game savefiles.

• Removed some unnecessary UI updates that were called when moving weapons around the deck. This should lead to way less severe stutters in late-game savefiles.

• Fixed VFX precompilation for a few weapons.

• Weapon descriptions are now handled by a single instance rather than per weapon. This reduces node count by up to 60% depending on your deck and should be a noticable CPU performance boost.

• The map icons are now combined into a single sprite rather than 13 individual ones. This is surprisingly a lot faster.

• Added GPU instancing to pretty much everything that's duplicated more than twice.

• Disabled projectile VFX when there's more than ~50 on screen.

The game now runs on "debug" mode, and should crash way less in theory. If you get a crash, please report it on discord! Just tell me when it happened (while loading to a new area, during a fight etc.) This does come with a performance hit, because the build is "less optimized" but the other optimizations should counteract that.

All of the optimizations resulted in ~60% more FPS (300 -> 500) in my test scene of 21 weapons in Snowy. The improvements completely depend on your hardware since the faster speed comes from a mix of CPU and GPU frametime changes.

Bugfixes

• Purple gem now properly counts items towards its multiplier, rather than just only weapons.

• The description of "More Weapons" buffs now show properly in the loot viewer.

• Fixed projectile buffs showing the wrong prefix when dealing damage.

• Fixed the target damage overlapping with the fight button or the sphere at very large numbers.

• Adjusted light intensity on combo descriptions.

• Adding a new projectile now properly overwrites the last projectile.

• Adjusted controller support, so hopefully the selector goes to where it's supposed to go more often.

• The total base damage UI of a weapon is now properly rounded.

• Projectile buffs no longer spawn in Common Weapons difficulty.

• Common Weapons difficulty now properly shows the shop rarity chances.

• "More Weapons" buff now properly displays the weapon category rather than a weapon name.

• Fixed a bug that lead to directional buffs disappearing seemingly at random.

• It should no longer be possible to get the same map twice in a row.

Thanks to everyone who played the game, and especially huge props to the playtesters who volunteered. They helped me fix a ton of issues on the beta branch, so that everyone else can have an awesome time with the game!

[ 2025-06-26 14:27:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

• Entrepreneur skill now properly resets between savefiles.

• World ender skill now bypasses the 10 weapon limit at the end of an area.

• Shop refresh price should properly reset between deaths and savefiles.

• Objectives should no longer generate with absurdly high targets on new savefiles after playing on a different one beforehand.

I might add something cool to the game later :3

[ 2025-06-07 07:21:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

• Somewhat of an optimization for projectiles. When you have more than 100 projectiles spawned in, then second slot projectiles will be simulated instead of actually spawned. This should greatly reduce lag and the cost of accuracy. I tried to match it reasonably closely, but it's not perfect.
• Projectile base damage and multiplier buffs now use bigint for calculations and UI.
• Made the "total buffs" section of weapon descriptions show scientific notation to avoid the text going outside of their backgrounds.

Migrated over to Godot version 4.5 dev 4. which should give a decent FPS boost on endgame savefiles. MIGHT BE UNSTABLE? BUT SO FAR IT'S FINE.

[ 2025-05-27 13:30:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

Thanks to everyone for the feedback on the game! It was really helpful with evaluating what to do next with the game. Now I won't sugarcoat this, it's not a huge update y'all might be expecting here, so sorry if it's underwhelming, but it should fix some of the issues people were having before (mainly the boring late game and the difficulty issues).

New Stuff

• Added projectiles. They can be bought in the shop (rare rarity) and are applied to weapons similarly to gems. A weapon's projectiles are activated on the last hit. Each weapon can have up to 2 sets of projectiles, which get triggered one after the other when a projectile dies. I'm bad at explaining it, but it makes sense in game.
• Added a legendary skill called "World Ender" which lets you take more weapons to the next area.
• Added a global buff that makes a certain weapon category more likely to appear in the shop.
• Added Frozen Gem which freezes the orb in place for 3 seconds but makes the weapon deal 10% less damage.
• Added 6 global buffs for projectiles: [olist]
• Projectile Strength: +base damage
• Projectile Power: +multiplier
• Penetration: +pierce to the first projectile
• Mediary: +pierce to the second projectile
• Final Blow: +projectile count to the last projectile
• Cluster: % chance to spawn the next projectile on pierce [/olist]
• Added Golden and Inverted variants to weapons.
• Added Inverted Gem which increases a weapon in the shop to become cursed by 0.5%.

Small additions

• Added an "exit to main menu" button to the area ending screen.
• Added a total base damage and total multiplier label to each weapon's description.

Bugfixes

• Descriptions of gems will show correct values after getting the Gempowered skill.
• Weapons should no longer be able to be bought and sold immediately at a profit in Normal Plus difficulty.
• Loot bags saved in the shop used to be unbuyable after a save reload when your deck is full.
• The next difficulty option is now only unlockable when you are on the difficulty before it as the text suggests.

Changes

After a fight, you are guaranteed to get $15. This value used to change based the % of overdamage you did. Increased the level limit combos:

• Deck buff: 8 -> 50 (up to 17.5x multiplier)
• Last weapon buff: 28 -> 50 (up to 22.5x multiplier)

Made every loot bag half as likely to show up Made global buffs more "exponential" (lower rarities give smaller buffs, while higher rarities give bigger buffs)

• Weapon Strength: (+30, +50, +75, +100, +150) -> (+20, +30, +40, +75, +125)
• Weapon Power: (2.0x, 2.5x, 3.0x, 3.5x, 4.0x) -> (1.5x, 1.75x, 2.0x, 3.0x, 4.0x)
• Field Strength: (+15, +25, +35, +40, +50) -> (+15, +17, +20, +30, +40)

Changed the phrasing of some weapons and buffs to make them less confusing. Changed target damage scaling once again. Previously it was not very steep (~1.1-1.25x increase), I made it a guaranteed 1.5x increase after area 3. Also made the first 3 (scripted) areas much harder (by about 30x at the end)

[ 2025-05-23 17:52:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

• Fixed a bug where if you pressed the back button while paused, and quickly pressed ESC while transitioning, the objective remained on screen.
• Fixed a bug where objectives could generate with obscenely high targets when starting a new save file. (only happened when you loaded a separate savefile)

[ 2025-05-11 15:55:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

• Changed orientation of Objective Refresh item to be synced up with other items.
• Fixed an issue where green gems were synced up.
• Changed the color of the Black Gem to be more visible on the weapon stands.

[ 2025-05-09 21:51:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi, here's a cool little update that should improve stuff (hopefully!)

New Features

• Added a refresh objective item (Rare) to the shop.

Changes

• Minor graphical adjustments.
• Target damage of objectives now generate based on prior max damage number for each weapon category. This should make objectives generally more fair to complete, since they no longer rely on the fight target damage.
• Fight target damage ramps up much faster.
• Chance based events have a max chance and they are harder to reach.

Objectives now have two target weapon categories and give a buff to each, making them easier to complete. The base price of Treasure Chests has been changed: $14 -> $12 The base price of Pickaxes has been changed: $13 -> $12 The skill "Pirate's Dream" has been buffed: 50% -> 75% chance. Lucky Clover: luck events are now guaranteed. Objectives give less money since they are way easier to complete now. Common, Uncommon and Rare loot bags appear less frequently now. The base price of all loot bags have been increased:

• Common: $5 -> $7
• Uncommon: $9 -> $11
• Rare: $11 -> $14
• Epic: $15 -> $17
• Legendary: $18 -> $20

Damage multiplier global buffs have been nerfed slightly (per rarity): (+2.0x +2.5x +3.0x +4.0x +5.0x) -> (+2.0x +2.5x +3.0x +3.5x +4.0x)

[ 2025-05-08 17:18:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

Switched renderer from the unstable Vulkan renderer to OpenGL 3, which should be WAY more efficient on lower end devices. I tried to match the visuals to the Vulkan version, but it's not 100% perfect. I also improved shader precompilation, which should mitigate stutters when loading new weapons. It's still going to be there for the first time, but it gets better the longer you play. (rendering is weird...) Let me know if there are any issues on Discord!

[ 2025-05-02 13:41:28 CET ] [ Original post ]

And here's another one!

More Optimizations

• Disabled glow as it didn't have much effect but cost ~0.31ms per frame
• Removed sub-surface scattering from all materials which cost ~0.17ms per frame

On my computer the improment is (on the same test scene but with more weapons, 2x render scaling and max shadows): GPU frametime: 2.1ms -> 1.58ms (25% faster) Once again, these improvements will vary from system to system.

Changes

• Adjusted skill rarity distribution: there should be more skill variation now.
• Savings Account (skill) was adjusted from: (30%, 40%, 50%) to (50%, 60%, 75%) money kept.
• Grounded (skill) deals 2x more damage and each level gives more damage than what it did before.

Bugfixes

• Lucky Streak (skill) now resets properly.
• You can no longer look at your deck while buying a loot bag.

[ 2025-04-30 19:40:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi there! The first update is here, so let's jump straight into what I changed:

Optimizations:

Total optimization: CPU frame time: ~4.5 ms -> ~3.8ms (10-20% improvement) Please note that this doesn't 100% translate over to real world performance in case your system is GPU bottlenecked.
These may not look like large numbers, but it's because I tested them on my strong enough computer, where the difference is hundredths of miliseconds per frame. Frame rate improvements may vary per computer. The test scene is the screenshot above with 30 buffs and 4 skills unlocked. Testing was done INSIDE THE ENGINE, not on an exported version (likely would have better performance there).

• Weapon Description: doesn't update position on screen while invisible: ~3-4% total frame time decrease
• UI 3D: no longer updates when invisible: runs 35% faster
• Trail Renderer: no longer updates when invisible: runs 50% faster
• Buff/Skill Scroll bar: doesn't update the scale and color of children when invisible: runs 84% faster
• Majorly decreased stutter when moving weapons around, loading the weapons for the first time in a savefile. (this mainly affected late-game savefiles with a lot of buffs)

Changes

• Changed how the camera behaves.
• Changed the looks of the weapon backgrounds during the area transition to make weapons more visible.
• Added additional particles to the Black Hole to improve its visibility.
• Combo descriptions should no longer clip off screen.
• Hitstop amount now depends on the target damage.

[ 2025-04-29 21:16:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi there! After 105 days of development time, COMBOLITE finally launched today on April 28th. Join the discord here: https://discord.gg/MRPH7QWprk

Changes since the demo

There have been WAY TOO MANY changes to list them all here, so I'm going to point out the main ones.

The ball has physics now!

You can hit the ball around and the game actually feels like you're making combos now!

"Combo" system

Whenever you get a buff, there's a chance that a combo gets generated instead. A combo is made up of 3 attack directions. If your weapons attack the sphere in that order, you will get some sort of advantage, like more damage or money.

Objectives give special skills!

Skills give certain weapons a unique skill or some ability that allows new and interesting synergies to be made. I added 20 skills in total for the release, each categorized into a rarity. There's also only one objective at the same time instead of three, so it's a bit easier to focus on them. The difficulty and rarity of each objective is determined based on the amount of damage the selected weapon category did, so weapons that you haven't really used recently will not get an impossibly hard objective.

Difficulty settings

I added 7 difficulty modes, each of them with some interesting twist that should change your strategy. Most of them are harder than the base normal mode, but some of them are easier while still giving the player a different experience. A new difficulty mode gets unlocked when reaching the end of area 3 in any gamemode.

Graphics improvements

I switched from the older OpenGL renderer, to the newer Vulkan renderer, which allowed me to do some additional fancy graphics. All of the maps were completely remade from the ground up, so it doesn't look like a floating circle in the middle of nothing anymore.

Basically doubled, or even tripled the amount of content!

• 8 categories of weapons, with a total of 34 weapons
• 29 collectable buffs
• 448 combos with 4 different special rewards

Future plans

Currently getting the game localized is my first step, and I have made some steps towards that already. I want to definitely add a bit more content to the game, especially in the area department, but for now I will be taking a short break to chill for a bit. If you have any cool ideas, recommendations, feedback, or anything like that, join the discord and let me know!

[ 2025-04-28 16:15:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

New Features

• Added save and quit button to pause menu. (such a great feature isn't it?)
• Added a tutorial that plays when you first play the game.
• Added some Steam achievements.
• Added an area counter to the map.
• Added "battle logs" which shows certain weapon events like bananas duplicating, treasure chests being opened etc.
• Added a setting to disable impact frames.
• Global buffs now show weapon count underneath their description.
• Added playtesters' names into credits.
• Added a custom cursor and settings for sizes.
• Finally added SFX to gems being applied.

Changes

• Increased slow-mo impact effect treshold to +25% of previous PB instead of +15%.
• Changed how weapon descriptions are positioned to hopefully make them clip less off-screen.
• Target damage ramps up MUCH faster in the late game.
• Loading screen plays when the game loads instead of when pressing the play button in hopes of burning out less people's eyes.
• Objectives now have an animation when they are collectable.

Bugfixes

• When clicking the deck view button with 0 weapons, the game no longer dies.
• Buffs and modifiers properly save/load now.
• Dying no longer softlocks the game.
• The "highest damaging weapon" part of savefiles now reset properly when erased.
• Hopefully arrows properly work now again? I don't know this system is so weird
• Fixed a bug where objectives refused to progress after loading a savefile.
• Small arrows of weapons should no longer be visible while paused.
• When selling a selected item, the move back to shop button doesn't break anymore.
• SFX and Music sliders properly save now.
• Objectives now correctly reset after fights
• Changed layout of target damage text so that it doesn't look weird on large numbers
• Shop no longer appears in deck view.
• Shop should no longer refresh prices when you go in and out of the pause menu.
• Locked items no longer persist between savefiles.
• Fixed a graphical bug where one of the fights were skipped on the map, and the one after it was overwritten once.
• Weapon descriptions should no longer clip outside of the window once again

Balancing and weapons:

New weapons:

• Midas Blade: A sword made out of solid gold. Deals +0.1x more damage for each gold coin you have.
• Black Gem: +5x damage multiplier. -0.25x for each weapon on the field.
• Black Hole: Every attack, destroy the item before or after it and gain +20 base damage.
• Treasure chest: Once destroyed, receive between $5 to $20 and a rare buff for a random weapon. 10% chance to destroy itself.

Buffs:

• Hammer: deals 3x damage if the sphere has broken armor.
• Blue Gem: +25, +35, +50, +65, +75 base damage based on rarity. Instead of a flat +25. Decreased base price from 7 to 5.

Nerfs:

• Red Gem: Increased base price from 5 to 7.

[ 2025-02-24 17:25:09 CET ] [ Original post ]