We've had three beta-branch releases that add and improve a LOT, and now this fourth one brings us back onto the main branch. Release notes here.

• First up, we're working on some visual upgrades to the ships and how we light them. It's not any work on their models, but the effect is still notable in terms of how lively and modern they feel. We've put up a lot of videos on that lately.
• There's still more to do on the ships (there are a lot of them!), so some of them look underwhelming at the moment but will be getting the full treatment soon.
• We fixed a number of bugs in these builds, though, and we wanted you to have those sooner than later.
• We also made a lot of updates to balance to make things more interesting and more challenging on the higher difficulties in particular. Things like counter-attacks from the AI are more likely to trigger now, dire guardians are way scarier, guardians in general have been rebalanced, a few overpowered golems are now tweaked to not be so OP, Raid Frigates can't be abused anymore, and...
• The Macrophage has seen an enormous influx of additions and extensions, starting with the Territorial Update, and moving into the Hive Wars update.
• Forcefields also have been adjusted and got some new abilities, including us adding the ability to have Hardened Forcefields as an option (those that don't shrink in size as they take damage) in addition to regular forcefields. Most of the mobile forcefield generating ships that you have use hardened forcefields now, and this makes them far more useful and less fiddly.
• You can create your own quick starts from in-game now!
• You can also turn on an option in the settings which let you load existing savegames or quickstarts into the lobby for further editing. This is a long-requested feature, and something we're still testing out a bit so it's hidden behind that optional feature.
• The graphical settings that are specific to one machine no longer get synced via the steam cloud, which is useful for those of you playing the game back and forth between two computers.
• Starting battlestations are stronger, camping next to the AI Overlord no longer freaks it out so much, and so much more.

More to come soon!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2020-02-13 18:58:43 CET ] [ Original post ]