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!