As Christmas is not quite as active as it usually is, I have more time on my hands for Devader. My gift to you are tons of big and small changes and improvements. If you feel like giving me a small gift, I would really love a review. Hint, hint. So what did I fix? To be honest I probably can't even remember half the stuff I've done. The first alpha was a bit of a mess, as I was mainly interested in finding out if upgrading to a new version would fix a weird game-pad input problem on Linux. I ended up just making an alpha for Windows/Linux that was way ahead of any planned schedule. Devader was no longer running on my 10 year old Linux laptop. The new alpha uses a 8192x8192 texture atlas for all the game images. But older graphic cards do not support that size. I managed to find an acceptable solution by simply scaling down the art and switching to a different rendering style. It's a little pixelated compared to full resolution, but it works. It's unlikely to affect many players, but at least I can now still test on my laptop.
Boss music was not playing. This caused a weird issue with music stacking up. The game thought the Boss music was playing which should mean level music is turned off. After the boss battle the boss music was turned off that was never turned on, leaving level music turned on as it was never turned off. So when the next level started, both level tracks were playing. Nice. All due to a mistake where I wrote > instead of >= ... So now if you reach the Tower King you should feel the Christmas spirit. Lightning was causing a few performance issues. In some cases a vast amount of lightning was created recursively, this has been limited by a lot.
Enemy spawning is now seeded, that means placement is not random. I had thought it was working before, but it certainly was not. Probably not something anyone noticed, but still kind of important. Choosing the same upgrades will now lead to a fairly consistent enemy spawning experience. I'm still not 100% sure it works all the time, but time will tell. Commander Ball of Destruction & Balls of Healing are now indestructible. This could be a good or a bad thing, I am really not sure, but I've decided to try it. Warlord The big choice after upgrades now highlights what you have selected. Still no actual visualization of what you will get, as some stuff might still be changed. Piercing Chest cannon now does more damage to smaller enemies and less to larger creatures. Shield-Field was rejecting some friendly units, this is no longer the case. Bosses Senalux lasers now have a short build up when they rotate, no more instant damage/kills. I've also changed the bouncing bullets. In general I'm trying to reduce chaos and randomness. Unfair deaths are not fun. Dios Illuminus Reworked the final boss again. The Warlord weapons were causing some significant issues (too easy). I've made quite a lot of changes to the attacks, giving a bit more space and some possibilities to graze bullets. It's still possible that some combinations or tools are too strong/weak. In the image below you can see what I was using to help me balance and understand the HP, blue is at full health. Hotter colors mean less HP.
Discord: https://discord.gg/AWhsvN3

[ 2020-12-25 12:03:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

I'm not sure if this is the right thing to do or not. But I've got a devlog over on tigsource and decided to maybe start posting here too.

Variation or Chaos

The original release of Devader has 14 different types of minor enemies that are just spiders. There are others too, but the spiders are pretty much the filler unit to add that extra bit of chaos and support the bigger enemies. In an earlier post I mentioned adding a ton of new alternatives to the spiders with different behaviors. So instead of 14 small enemies (peons) I had over 60... A level in Devader is split into 6 waves + boss wave. Each wave has a simple definition specifying which of the 14 spiders will appear. This can look like this [2] or [1,8] or [-5]. [2] means only spider 2 can appear. [1,8] activates spider 1 and 8. [-5] allows all spiders from 0 to 5 to appear. To prevent having to redo everything I made 4 groups out 56 peons, so 4 groups of 14. Spawning peon [1] now meant randomly selecting from the 4 groups. So peon A1, B1, C1 or D1. This turned out to be very chaotic. I then switched to seeded-random to chose which enemies would appear in which wave. So wave X would always only spawn A1 or B1, but no longer both. The random seed is determined by the players upgrade choices. This makes sense for the game as the upgrade choices determine the outcome of the game with different final bosses and various other things. Play-testing showed me the experience was still highly chaotic as every wave would throw something entirely new at you. The player never had time to get to know an enemy as it would mostly only appear once and then never again. So instead of per wave I now make the choice of peon on a level basis. There are 7 levels. Each level specifies 2 new peon types that can appear. So in a full run you will only encounter 14 different peons (not entirely true). This seems to be a fairly good solution, but it will need some balancing and testing for sure. [img width=800]https://i.imgur.com/7A4Hew4.jpg[/img] img desc: The gray creatures spawn the blue pulsating stationary explosive creatures. It can get out of hand when your main damage dealer is blocked by the outer ring, as is the case here. (fixed) Besides the peons I had also created a huge amount of creatures I call grunts. These beasts are much larger and more menacing. To include them into the game I again used the seeded random information I had defined for each wave. Only waves without mini-bosses or bosses can spawn grunts and when one appears it reduces the amount of peons that can be spawned. It's pretty straight forward and should work nicely, but certainly needs some balancing and testing.

Power-Ups

Power-ups in Devader have been very straight forward. There is hardly a reason not to pick them up, there is not much of a choice going on. Weapon power-ups stack and you get the rewards from both while they last. Power-Ups have limited ammo, it was my way of trying to make it a good idea to preserve them by not shooting. I don't think it really does, or at least it does not work on me. As picking up power-ups is a no brainer, it's not really interesting. To make things worse not having power-ups kind of sucks, as you feel a lot less powerful. If you get destroyed you lose them all so it's quite troubling. To mitigate this, I added a new feature. When you lose your bot the power-ups you are carrying are blown out and you get the chance to pick them back up. I started off by allowing weapon power-ups to be retrieved and eventually added HP + SP to the list. HP and SP add +1 capacity to health and shields. It makes dying less punishing, but also gives you the choice of taking additional risk to retrieve what you have lost or to accept the loss. In a multi player game your allies will have to go in and collect your stuff as respawning takes a bit of time. I have not tested it yet though. HP is special in Devader. There is a container you can pick up and it restores all your health. If you are at full health you get +1 HP-capacity. It's pretty valuable to get the latter, but if you just lose a bit of HP you miss out. You can restore HP by grazing bullets and picking it up later, but sometimes there are no bullets. My above changes lead to destroyed HP containers leaving the same remnants as if you had just lost your robot. So a destroyed container no longer restores your full HP but gives you +1 HP capacity. I noticed while playing that I sometimes rather waited for the containers to get destroyed as it was more beneficial. But waiting is not really fun. Soooo... I decided to make containers destructible for the player. This was actually something that was in the game right at the start, but at the time it didnt really work. Now it makes it a lot more interesting.

Linux issues

On a different note I received some linux-customer feedback and one player (maybe 2) have an issue with gamepad on Linux. It seems like this is not something that I am directly causing and assume it's a problem with webkit. Main issue is that I've made a huge amount of changes to the game and I am not in the most balanced of versions right now. Nonetheless after plugging through all of the above I decided to make a new version. Windows went fine, but the Linux version did not work off the bat. Turns out my older laptop no longer can run the game, due to the fact that I now have a 8192x8192 texture atlas and no longer 4096x4096. Turns out 4096 was the upper limit... So now what do I do? I currently only see one option, if it's supposed to work on older hard-ware and that is recalculating the texture atlas for every level. AAAAARGH. Not something I want to do as it will cause delays. I have no idea what can be expected from most peoples hard-ware.

Debug Build

If you want to see what I am working on, switch to the Alpha branch! There a hundreds of changes that no one besides myself has tested. There is a new robot, that might not ever be included but it's in there now and can be tested. No explanations/tutorials I am afraid. Expect some things to break or not be good. Feedback appreciated. Discord: https://discord.gg/AWhsvN3

[ 2020-12-17 12:08:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

Looks like my last post (1. April) was taken seriously. To be frank there have not been many sales since (not that there were many before). I've been working on some pretty crazy stuff, but it will take some time for me to get them release-ready.

I started a small side-project that I hope will allow me to make more interesting bullet-pattern-designs for new enemies and bosses.

Then I got slightly side-tracked by this bullet-pattern-designer and started creating a small prototype for a relaxing, playful game that's actually nearly finished after not even two weeks of work. short video of the current state

[ 2020-04-30 14:26:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

Devader has been out since September last year and sales have not lived up to what I was hoping for. So I've taken steps to make the best of the situation and will be converting Devader into an RTS. I have quite a few assets already made and the basic prototype works and synchronizes for a current max of 3 players.

[ 2020-04-01 14:59:58 CET ] [ Original post ]

It's not often you get to post an update on a leap day, I'm rather impressed with myself for pulling it off. I've made a few updates to Devader. Some minor bug fixes and enemy adaptations. Most noticeable could be: - the menu is less "jumpy" when using a controller, it now requires you to move the stick a bit further. - recalling turrets/switching into hedgehog mode is now game-speed independent. You can lower the recall/switching time under Gamepad->Recall Warden. (I've just made a note for myself, that this option should be under Gameplay and be called "Turret Action") - if you lower the game speed (or increase it) sound effects for shots and explosions will also be played at the changed speed. When you die, time slows down for a bit and you might notice this change there too. - I've made a redesign of some destructible bullets, they now have a black outline and a colorful core Today Devader received it's first negative review. I'm kind of sad, but also a bit excited? Better some feedback than just a refund. I would really love to resolve the issue described by the reviewer, but I don't really understand the problem. So far I have not been able to make contact. I'm working on an updated trailer for Devader, with some new footage. I am interested to hear what you think. I still need to make a better recording for the "play with friends" bit. Currently just AI players and it looks a bit bland. [previewyoutube=S3Z2iqYNOJ0;full][/previewyoutube]

[ 2020-02-29 19:48:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

So I am going a little crazy on the updates right now... Sorry? Watching TravelDemon destroy Deity using turrets made me question a few of my balance choices again. At launch there was a sort of soft limiter to the turrets, as going down that path would remove all weapons from the Devader. Players didn't like it, but I stuck with it for quite some time. It did prevent the turrets from getting out of hand though. Without the soft limit, turrets in masses can get crazy strong and I see no reason why they could not just dominate pretty much every path I've designed. This is not what I want, as I believe this could prevent players from trying out different strategies. I've had a solution up my sleeve for quite some time, but I did not really want to do it. The more turrets are on the field, the less damage every individual turret does. If you have less than 4 turrets, they will actually do a bit more damage than they did in the previous build (this might help out people who think turrets are bad, or if you have lost most of them). Every turret above 4 will be a little less efficient. A big bunch of turrets will still wreck most enemies, but it will slow down killing bosses and give them a bit more time to deal damage. I think it will hardly be noticeable for most players, but I hope it will improve the experience and make handling a large amount of turrets more interesting. I've also taken (yet another) look at some of the most brutal waves, e.g. Deru on Deity was (and still is) pretty insane. I've reduced shot-speed a little, depending on how many Deru are still around. This will give a better dodge-reaction-chance. Legolos now has 3 tentacles on Deity, seemed easier than the Hard version and I had to fix that.

[ 2020-02-19 18:26:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

After talking to the new record holder TravelDemon and finding out he plays on Linux, I just had to update the Linux build today. Along with that I made a small update to the Upgrade UI, hoping this will lead some players down my intended upgrade paths.
The explosives spawned by Centipedos now slightly pulsate, I hope this will make them a bit easier to spot, without completely changing the visuals. I tried using alternate colors, but did not like the result. If you want to check out TravelDemon's deathless Deity run: [previewyoutube=REDiE2ppNzk;full]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REDiE2ppNzk[/previewyoutube]

[ 2020-02-18 16:57:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

First of all: TravelDemon totally destroyed all previous high-scores. Looks like even Deity mode was no match for the demon. I'm impressed to say the least.
I've added some engine-noise to the tank, so far it was silent. You probably wont notice it, unless you turn down the music though. Still, I felt like it was something that was missing. I fixed an issue with the final boss on the score path. The tentacles were not getting created anymore due to an optimization I made in an earlier patch. Ups. Not game-breaking, but the boss was a lot less interesting and a lot easier because of this. Don't think anyone noticed though? I'm still working on a new batch of enemies, to make each run even more diverse and interesting. This creature looks pretty cool, but I need to come up with an interesting mechanic/attack pattern still. If you have any ideas, I would gladly hear them :)
One reason for the new creatures is that I want to make the game more visually captivating. I'm not that happy with my current trailer (it's pretty outdated) and would like to have more weird creatures. Only updated Windows for the time being.

[ 2020-02-17 17:28:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

I mentioned reworking the "Tank" Devader in the last update. The tank received a new rocket launcher and is now much more viable, as you can do damage from a long distance. It's still hard to handle, but it's no longer just a gimmick. I managed to get the third highest score on Deity using the tank. Currently I hold all three Deity high scores, I hope this will change.
The rocket launcher was the second special upgrade on the "Protect" branch. Taking it was a pretty easy solution for the tank. I first felt like I could get away with just moving the remaining special upgrade up a notch. Lazy solution. But.... it did not feel right, so I had to come up with something. The new upgrade comes with a pretty drastic change to the Blinker (no more Hedgehog mode) and a less invasive one for the Warden. I hope you like the new challenge. I did make a few other changes, but nothing too drastic. Good news everyone: Linux build was updated this time!

[ 2020-02-11 16:26:40 CET ] [ Original post ]

- waves will no longer endlessly spawn foes, if key enemies are not destroyed - hp of some enemies reduced - added some more info text - bullet grazing visualized (+audio) only on bullets that can be grazed - a few additional enemies on Easy - some small visual changes to a few enemies - small fixes Currently just Windows, will be adding a Linux update soon.

[ 2020-02-07 21:54:58 CET ] [ Original post ]

I received some feedback on tigsource regarding game-feel. Additionally,I found the very well hidden information about returned products/refunds. In it there were 2 mentions of missing co-op. I guess I need to make that more obvious, or they were hoping for online multiplayer. I've not actually tried Devader with steams remote-play, my internet will probably be to bad though. There were also a few with "not fun", one of which was mentioned the starting weapon does not feel good in a short comment. This does tie into the game-feel mentioned on tigsource. I've added quite a lot of fluff to make stuff feel better. I hope this will not be too detrimental to performance. Most of it is framerate dependent, so if you have low framerates it should not add more effects. - Muzzle effects on the weapon while firing - more screenshake - slight dust particles are thrown up when the Devader or assistants move - The Devader has engine-noise - bullet grazing has a slight electrostatic noise - invincibility is audible - I've added some explanation for the power-ups + multiplayer - Explosions have a chance of spawning child-explosions -> less monotonous - Some explosions have been altered - pitch randomization reduced, reduce muddy sounds - particles for destroyed assistants - fixed a bug that prevented impact visuals to spawn when spiders attack - fixed a bug that was causing doppler-effect to fail (you likely wont notice this) - added impact explosions for touch damage on the matrix - slight change to how units are initialized, should help with performance (minor) - minor changes to balance/enemies - adjusted dynamic range compression of audio. I noticed sounds in Devader felt a bit muffled compared to Gungeon. I think it's better now. - some adjustments to the "flee". It moves faster on higher difficulties - missile cursor size can be adjusted in settings -> accessibility - increased main weapon volume Update is currently still Window only. Linux/Mac on request or with the next larger update.

[ 2020-01-22 18:02:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

Happy New Year!
New Year, New Hope After 4 years of working on Devader, I've vowed to invest more time into showing people what I made. Silence is pretty deadly in this industry and I hope I can be better. I love making games, but exposure is crucial. Balance Since release I've made quite a few balance changes. Most thanks to valuable player feedback. In some cases I adjusted too far and had to roll back, but overall it's been a great experience. Hearing what players think and watching streamers play is very informative and I've spent way too much time doing this. I will continue to show progress on the "experiment" beta branch, so if you want to know where things are heading, that's the branch to be on. I only support Windows on the beta branch, but if there is enough demand for Linux/Mac builds, I will consider making experiment builds available for those systems too. Housekeeping Devader has lots of settings. I've removed some of the most confusing ones and tried to make others clearer. There are still some obscure settings available, but I feel they have a reason to exist. I've also been squashing minor bugs and creating major new ones (wip).
Score High The new update will give better scores. I needed to lower the score multiplier upgrade as it was a clear requirement to get the high-score. If I only change the multiplier this would mean that earlier high-scores would no longer be reachable. The only way to change this was by making all new scores higher. I'm expecting to see some disruption to the leader-boards. Portals I've added new "mysterious" portals, that allow you to skip to the end of a level. The portal allows you to take a shortcut and reduce run time. Some requirements must be met for the portals to show.
The Turret Path I've removed the most hated feature I built, repair. Repair completely changed the required play-style as your Devader no longer could shoot. It was too experimental. Some players did quite well with it and had fun, but in most cases it was seen as an inferior alternative to the standard play-style. Now it's gone and you can take as many turrets as you like with no weird consequences. I've made turrets a little less powerful again, more in line with what was originally balanced. Instead of making turrets too strong, you now get some turrets back at the start of each level. UI Improvements There is a shit ton of stuff going on in Devader. It can be quite hard to follow. The new version now shows health, shields and available turrets around your Devader. This let's you keep your focus. Turning off the UI in the settings is now much more viable. There are also two color modes available. The default setting shows health, shields and turrets in the color of the respective pick-ups. The visually more pleasing option can be enabled in the settings (-> visual settings -> color coding) and is always used in multi-player. The inner ring shows health, the outer ring represents shields and the little dots represent the available turrets.
The Future I've got tons of ideas I would like to add. Currently there are 12 default bosses (2 for each level), 1 main boss and 12 special path bosses (1 for every maxed path). I would like to add 6 more level bosses and even more variation to the waves. Currently every wave has one alternate, but I would like to add a second or even third. I also have some ideas for new vehicles with completely different mechanics (e.g. more RTS and tower-defense elements), but those will require quite some time and dedication. If you are interested or have ideas, let me know. Feedback is very much appreciated and I enjoy experimenting with new ideas.

[ 2020-01-12 12:34:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

After releasing Devader I felt a bit lost, I got a lot of support from friends but only very few streamers picked it up. I am very grateful for the ones that did! Watching the streams/videos gave me a lot of new insights about how the game is played and where people struggle. I still have a few of these issues to address. It feels like I need to add more tutorials, namely for nuke targeting (gamepad), turret handling and bullet grazing. But I hate destroying the flow with more clutter. To get out of the lost state, I just decided to dive back in and improve wherever I could. So a lot has happened in the last 2.5 weeks, also thanks to some very helpful people on my Discord. What you will first notice is the front page now has a whole bunch of blacked out icons. I became aware that nearly no one understood that Devader offers a huge variety of different paths leading to different play-styles and different Bosses. The game is very deterministic, so if you always do the same thing, you will get the same results. The icons represent beating the game depending on the difficulty, winning with different game endings and surviving using one of the skill choices. The badges are color graded. You get a green badge for beating Easy. All the other badges require you to play on Normal or higher. Bronze is for Normal, Silver for Hard and Gold is awarded to Deity wins. I've been working hard on making Deity more viable. Deity used to be something I just added for fun. I did not really expect people to play on Deity, but boy was I wrong. So now Deity has received quite the make-over. Impossible bosses have been tweaked to be extremely hard, but most have some kind of trick/weak spot for the determined player to discover. This is also true for most bosses in the game anyway, but Deity bosses will pretty much require you to find a solution. The Blinker turret was deemed much less useful than the Warden. Interestingly enough, it used to be the other way around, but at that time most people were playing on lower difficulties. With larger amounts of foes & bullets, the more flexible Warden becomes a lot more attractive. The very static Blinker tends to be taken out by the hordes. To counter this imbalance, the Blinker has been given a new defensive mode. The defensive mode works like the recall ability of the Warden and can be switched at any time (switching affects all Blinkers). While in "Hedgehog" mode Blinkers can not attack, but will only take 10% of the normal damage. This can make them useful to distract enemies, or simply to hide behind.
Healing balls are attracted to friendly units, they could even be too strong now. The Ammo upgrade was pretty unimpressive, due to some changes I made shortly before release. It has received a buff, that is tied to bullet grazing. Instead of just firing 2 shots the graze cannon now fires 2+(Ammo-Level) shots, making it way stronger. Skills have seen a lot of changes. I have to admit that I did not do myself a favor by adding the skills only a month before release. The balance was completely off and I do hope that the new changes will be appreciated and make the skills more even and interesting. Additionally, every skill now adds a twist to the bullet grazing mechanic. The one you can see here extends grazing to any other nearby shot and works best on slow moving dense fields.
The Skills now use the complementary color of your Devader to make them visually more distinct. This can be changed in the options under Accessibility along with a bunch of other new settings. One streamer rightly complained about the sound effects being bad and while watching his video I could only agree. For some reason it was fine on my system. Yesterday I finally managed to reproduce the problem he was experiencing. By strongly reducing the volume a lot of sounds ended up not getting played. This should not happen and I managed to fix the problem by composing all the sound effects first before reducing the volume. It was a big change and I hope it won't have any negative impacts I am not aware of. High-Scores: Have been an astonishingly painful experience. I think the new build should resolve the issues with crazy high scores as I've changed the score verification process on the server. The Steam high-score list is still messed up, but I will be resetting those scores and uploading the corrected ones in a few days. That is the plan at least. I've made so many changes in the last 3 weeks, I have likely forgotten some pretty significant ones. This was all just off the top of my head... If you have any issue, please report them. I want to make Devader as good as I can. I know now I should have released into Early Access first, but I don't think that can be changed. So I am just going to plod on and do what I can. Don't like something, tell me!

[ 2019-09-21 10:58:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

Something was wildly wrong with the Server. CPU was maxing out and I was not able to access any database related stuff in spite of root access. I unfortunately had to restore the entire system from a 5 days old backup, meaning high-scores got lost. Sorry!! I must still add some fallback method to be able to restore the Database in case of further issues. But I have removed some code that might have been responsible and am monitoring the Server more frequently. CPU is hardly doing anything as should be expected from high-scores. What currently is no longer working: Seeing friends high-scores. This required me to check the friend-highscore-tables of steam and was possibly the cause of the whole problem. I will look into finding a solution to this, but not right now.

[ 2019-09-04 10:59:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

Sorry to say but something is going wrong in the high-score department. Looks like primarily a server issue, but I have not got the bottom of it yet. Currently the server is down, meaning you wont be able to view or create any new high scores. Working on finding a fix asap.

[ 2019-09-03 13:38:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

Devader has just been released. Finally. It took a lot longer than expected. I was very close to releasing a year ago, but decided against it. I was promising 17 endings, but it all felt the same. So why was I offering so many endings? It seemed more like a chore. This forced me to rethink. Instead of going the sensible route of just scrapping the alternate endings, I did the opposite. Just so that you understand what I am on about in the next section, I need to explain. Devader is a one room game, there are no levels in the common sense. You are defending a hexagonal matrix in the center of the game world. At your disposal are your standard guns, a crowd control weapon, turrets and some other cool stuff. The enemies attack in waves and each level/section of the game is built up out of 6 waves and a boss wave. All in all there are 7 levels -> 49 waves for one full run. There are 8/12 different upgrades to chose from at the end of every level. If you chose the same upgrade every time, you can maximize it and this will give you an alternate game ending. So I made all these alternate endings (short animations), but there was no reason to play the game other than to see them. What could I offer to make it worth while? What does a game need in this situation? New final bosses of course! As I enjoyed making bosses, that felt like a no brainer. But it should not have been. Making bosses is a lot of hard work, as I should have already known. So I started making bosses, 12 alternate endings meant 12 new bosses. So far I had only made 7 in 3 years. To be fair, I was also working on the game engine (custom WebGL/js engine) and many other things during that time. I soon realized, that just adding new final bosses, only changes the very end of the game. As that realization hit me, I knew I was in deep. I was kind of commitet now after making 4 new bosses. So what could I do about the rest of the game? Easy!!! Add alternate bosses for each level, so that the game offers more variety. That meant I needed 6 alternate bosses, one for each level. https://youtu.be/o_dSmqe8P-o Final boss + 12 special final bosses + 2*6 level bosses = 25 boss monsters. Not bad. But... was that enough? The levels before the bosses are kind of still the same. Obviously I needed alternate waves too... and what about the game mechanics? If you are always doing the same thing, it gets kind of boring. I needed more mechanics/special abilities aka stuff. I was beginning to realize the advantage of random drops so prevailent in many games (Isaac, Gungeon). The randomness keeps things fresh, as you never know what you will be getting + it adds a layer of luck and a reason to try again. "It was just bad luck, next time it will go much better." The thing is, I don't really like games using too much luck. It feels unfair to me. As if I only win by luck and only die by because of bad luck. So this was not an option. My eventual solution was to link the new stuff to the default upgrades. Players are in total control of what they will get. This gave the slightly boring upgrades new life and gave me a lot more work to do. I ended up adding 23 different special abilities. Many of which I based on games being made by friends of mine. The special abilities unlock after 2-4 levels of one upgrade. Some simply change the behaviour of your weapons, others force you to use an entirely different play style. Not everything is beneficial, but if you want to see all the endings... About a month ago, I released a demo for Devader on Steam. It was mostly well received. But I also got some strong negative feedback from one player. He was not at all impressed by the demo and had some valid feedback. It was rather harsh, but I befriended him and managed to get some more in depth detail on his thoughts. It did turn out that he had played the demo on easy. This did relieve me quite a bit. I gave him a key to the full game, told him to play on Hard (the special mechanics only appeared then) and he did say it was better. His main feedback was that the early game was always the same. Kind of boring. Unfortunatley he never tried Hard. But the critism did strike me as valid. Many people were going to play on Easy and Normal. So... you might have guessed it, I had to change the early game. This time it involved adding an additional button, something I had been opposed to for a long time. I was already using too many buttons in my opinion. But it was worth a shot. Skills were born. I came up with 8 new skills in an hour and pretty much spent the next 2 days adding them in. It was a lot of fun. The new skills included 3 new structures, a sort of dodge roll like mechanic called phasing, bombs and a drone that can be moved around like in an RTS. Some ended up taking a lot of time to integrate properly. The new skills changed a lot. Instead of upgrading and discovering new stuff later on, you set out on your journey with one of 8 skills that have a strong influence on your play style (if used correctly and thoroughly). https://youtu.be/pvRMxFt-0FE So what have I learnt? I now know what I should have done last year, but I also know, that I am not the person to make that correct decision. I was thinking about changing my middle name to "Feature". "Feature Creep" would be a bit weird as a middle name.

[ 2019-09-02 10:50:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

- Woushellios less tanky - "lingering" battle was much too hard, improved - Rotario has less weight, was pushing too much stuff around - Magenta spiders now have less HP - I broke the highscores with my last update, fixed - noticed Easy highscores were broken all along, fixed Will be making Linux/Mac builds now!

[ 2019-09-01 11:52:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

- tweaked weapon level 6 vs final boss as with missing chest cannon it's near impossible - fixed arrow targeting speed preview - keyboard info is shown in all caps, should be better for Chinese + consistency - phasing revisited. there is now a limiter that goes down while phasing instead of corrupting the nuke timer - Japanese partial translation added - turret upgrades were adding too much hp/sp -> reduced again (still more than at first) - leaving the game at the end of a level, allows you to come back with score intact and no loss of continues - server side updates

[ 2019-08-31 21:21:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

- Final Boss Stage, the explosive bullets can be shot down - Sacrifice Skill damages all players equally (near death, but no kills) and kills or halves hitpoints of all enemies - Pumpkin Rain, slight range increase - Ball of Destruction will attract enemies - Accomplished paths are visualized on front screen - Bullet Sponge images extended - Fixed small server bug that would allocate a path to a score, even if you had left it - Phase Shift causes more nuke delay Still Windows only, will be making Linux/Mac builds soon. But demand does not seem high.

[ 2019-08-30 16:47:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

- added localisations for Spanish, Russian, Chinese, French & Brazilian Portuguese - added icon for settings, as I could not find it with other languages - added icon for language menu, so you don't get completely stuck if you don't know the language - made a few changes in tutorial information - hot fix for level 43 on Hard

[ 2019-08-29 12:22:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

- reverted turret changes for Easy as it functions entirely differently - reworked repair path - moved back chest cannon special on weapon upgrades - reduced explosive ball damage - fixed issue on loading Titan Wall (it created normal Matrix instead) - nerfed weapon upgrade, it was too strong compared to all other options - tentaclos on deity is now more dangerous/fires bullets - for the final level a wall is built to protect the matrix - starting wave of final level on weapons path commences slower - grazing bullets reduced to 1 dmg, the extended range makes it so much easier - grazing health gain reduced to 0.5 still Windows only atm. The next update will include localizations for French, Russian, Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese (Brasilian)

[ 2019-08-29 07:22:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

pretty big update, balance wise. still Windows only as my iterations are really high right now... - went through every single boss on deity today, to see if it might be beatable and made some adaptations - grazing range extended from 100, to 150 - grazing shot power reduced to 2 from 3 - fixed Snowflake, did not fire on Easy/Normal since last update - altered shot patterns on final boss, reduced randomness. seems better - turret upgrades have been buffed, more shields/armor, fortify also increases shot rate a bit, protect increases firepower - turrets are stronger on higher difficulty levels - using phase shift makes the nuke timer go up again, 1 sec phasing -> 1 sec longer wait for nuke - final scene, fixed a position jump in mother ship

[ 2019-08-27 22:53:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

- made adjustment to special level on weapons path - added new menu for accessibility - white under Devader turned off by default again - missile/pulse ready-circle is smaller but more visible - adjustment for foe "deru" - pressing F11 a lot caused crashes, should at least be more resilient now - font changed to Montserrat with adapted numbers (should be easier to read) - photosensitivity warning on start - Snowflake less HP, faster bullets on Hard+ - Tower of Power, less HP - Supply Drop nerfed, only one item per type per drop

[ 2019-08-26 12:30:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

Too much work to get all systems up and running at current time. Focused on fixing any issues on Windows first, so that it can be tested before release. - reticle should be more visible, targeting line always on top - nuke/emp preparing is signaled visually at reticle/around Devader - weapon power ups that die, leave an energy trace that can still be picked up within 8 seconds - deity allows choosing of your nuke/turret/etc, no longer random - standard ending can be selected in highscore view - white circle under Devader (accessebility test) - background can be turned off - splatter opacity can be set - fixed game pad bug that only could happen if you had never played... great bug for new player and even better to find. Fun! - made some adjustments to level sequence + added two new waves - fixed weapon path level "bravery" - added sound-effect when a special upgrade is selected - armor/shield/turret containers start to smoke before they get destroyed - fixed continue information on main screen to show the level, not wave

[ 2019-08-24 22:40:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

I've been bad about informing... I'm trying to improve. So I am just going to list some build changes that occurred in the last 10 days ---- 10. Aug + painting the ground with not working clicks can be turned off in settings (opacity to 0) + tooltip not going away is annoying if you are using a mouse, fixed + removed the storm layer + bullet grazing gives 8*3 special bullets, strong and full range + turret path, changes weapon but now you still have one. charge to fire + hard+ enemy bullet speed increased + UI with audio-feedback and some mouse-over stuff + only 2 power up pods now, but the last one collected get infinite ammo + hitting targets increases the impact explosion of shots ---- 12. Aug + circoloss (more hp + additional panic weapon) and tower boss (reduced laser intervall) have been changed a bit + steam overlay works now, but I have no idea what it's for. not sure if that might be related to the crash ---- 13. Aug + fixed issue with sacrifice... new method: executing player is nearly killed, all other units heavily damaged. this can kill allies + temporary scores were not showing correct information + additional game speed setting, you can now set to full control. this means the game will not change your settings no matter what the difficulty level is. (you can speed up with +, slow down with -). minimum for going to speeds below the game difficulty setting is "allow slow down" + now exports 3 translation files with full information, I will have to add the missing option again later ---- -> full: export: JSON with key, the selected language, english, german, hint -> blank: exports a file that can be used to translate the current language -> csv: key, the selected language, english, german, hint + pick up power-ups as "ghost" is possible again ---- 14. Aug + translation export extended (all data Ctrl-9, just current iso Ctrl-0, just missing for current iso Ctrl-8) + some changes if you go down the Weapons upgrade path in the final levels + some balancing tweaks ---- 20. Aug + starts in windowed by default (if you have set to fullscreen, it will switch to fullscreen on startup) + F11 switches between windowed and fullscreen + windowed mode now has a border, as it was confusing people. changed even though it was prettier + fixed a bug where some enemy shots did not damage the matrix -> slight rebalance required + hyperloop on hard is a bit more aggressive + updated a lot of localization data + added button info on the startup screen for cancel/confirm and F11 + some events were lost when going into pause -> the gun could be on kind of auto-fire after unpausing/new level, fixed ---- 21. Aug + first level on Hard, the intro boss now has much less health + linux version should now start in windowed mode, F11 for full-screen + mac version F11 does not work for some bloody reason + fixed a sound issue (crackling, then mute) caused by too many "electricity-spiders"

[ 2019-08-21 09:32:28 CET ] [ Original post ]

I uploaded the Devader Demo a few weeks ago. Mainly in the hopes of getting some feedback and hoping for a bit of exposure. I did not get much of either, but it was still good to do. Turns out a lot of people chose easy. I guess everything that looks a bit like bullet hell is assumed to be terribly punishing and hard. But easy in Devader really is meant to be easy. Normal mode was the top choice. Even a few let's players gave it a go. The video I enjoyed best was recorded by Blended Threat Games, where they play Devader in 2 Player co-op. Blended Threats Gaming - Play Devader One player gave me some very informative feedback. He had expected Devader to be more of a tower defense game + felt the early game was too repetitive. As "feature creep" is my middle name, I could not let this chance go and added a new button for "skill". There are 8 new skills to discover right from the start, that can strongly influence the way you play the game, or at least give you different options. Among the new choices are player enhancements (~dodge roll), weaponry (bombs) + additional defensive tools. Furthermore I've removed one of the difficulty options. Normal was the one mode I personally felt was most useless for a long time. Due to the new skills, normal mode became entirely obsolete. Skills are not available on easy, so nothing changed there, but normal was suddenly too easy. So the old Hard is the new Normal and I am happy to say it's a good improvement. I won't be updating the demo and will probably remove it in the coming days. It has always been a limited view of the game and now even more so. Plus I have enough to do with the main build and don't want to provide support for both.

[ 2019-08-21 09:08:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

I just made my first release on Steam. Feels good. So I decided to also make my first entry here. Go me!

[ 2019-07-17 21:54:59 CET ] [ Original post ]