Hello, pilots!

Thanks to all your feedback, we added and modified some elements, gameplay, balancing and progression. Lets start with the new stuff.

Emotes in game

Many of you want a better way to communicate with the opponent than wiggling. A chat system does not necessarily seem wise, we prefer to add a wheel of emotes to share a fun moment with your opponent. More emotes will be added in the future and you will be able to customize your emote wheel as you want. You can use them with 1/2/3/4 on the keyboard or with the D-pad on your controller. Emotes will be unlockable by playing the game and reaching certain levels or by achieving challenges.

Progression System

At the launch of Exoblast, we made all the ships, pilots and game mode available from the beginning. This has caused you three problems: [olist]

You could play against experienced opponents who take away the pleasure of smooth discovery.

Once the gameplay was in hand, you had no real reason to take levels.

A guided discovery of the game was missing. [/olist] So weve added a first progression system that will make you play against AI at level 1, before unlocking the online mode at level 2 and the ranked mode at level 6. The same goes for the ships: you will unlock them from level 3 to level 5 depending on the difficulty of taking control of them. As we just said before, emotes and other things will be unlockable through leveling and achievements in the future.

A necessary balancing

You quickly found the most outperforming character and ship combos. This allowed us to see that these combos were too strong and became omnipresent. We have therefore done a balancing that should completely disrupt the meta and hopefully make almost all combos viable.

Statistical Changes

We removed the fire rate which was the same for all ships.
We added the shield size. All ships have their shield sizes reduced to 80% (except the Hovership which stays at 100%).

Pilot Balance

Rikito : Aggression duration > 3s to 1.5s Rikito profited too much from his aggressiveness which created a snowball effect very hard to counter.
Nisha : Adrenaline > 2% to 3% Nisha is the least used character. Increasing her adrenaline, we hope you will feel a real usefulness to her kit.

Ships Balance

Bee : Health points increased > 25hp to 50hp. The Bee has a nervous gameplay, but gets destroyed by bullets not being powerful. We want to slightly reduce the punitive aspect of its kit.
Hovership : Shield return power > 75% to 150% Projectiles speed > 300 to 208 Charging speed > 2.7 to 3.1 The Hovership was a decent ship, but it struggled too much to send powerful bullets. From now on, the ship will be able to rely on smash shields to send ultra-fast bullets.
Devonian : Shield deflection power > 50% to 75%
Destroyer : Maximum Power > 6 to 6.5
Pretorian : Move speed > 302 to 292 Recovery of projectiles > 65% to 60% The Pretorian/Rikito combo was widely used. So we nerfed the ship so that it can be countered while remaining viable.

Bug fixes and features

the timer stops at the last set point and no longer after the victory animation.
Joystick navigation on the readycheck has been removed to avoid missclicks.
Accents are now filtered on the End Game screen.
The custom popup translation is now fixed.

Thank you for your feedback!

Constructive criticism is really useful to us, whether positive or negative, so thank you for sharing your feelings with us! Positive reviews allow us to expand the community and thus improve the game accordingly. For those who dont know yet, we are very active on Discord so join us! https://discord.gg/2mMTMRxaCb See you in the arena, pilots!

[ 2022-02-10 15:03:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

Pongarena
Dreamirl

Developer

Dreamirl

Publisher

2020-07-22

Release

Indie F2P Singleplayer Multiplayer

Game modes:

Online “quick”: play against random players
Local: fight against the AI or a friend on the same computer
Customized: create your game with the settings you want, and invite anyone to join you
Training: fight against an AI that is adapting to you, to make you a better fighter
Ranked: reach the top of the Space Tower, qualifying you fight after fight, and reach the top ranking

Choose your pilot:

In Pongarena you are free to choose your pilot, each of them has unique talents and will influence the way you play.
Some pilots are a better match with some ships, create your own combinations to outmatch your opponents.

Your ship, your rules:

Do you prefer a fast and aggressive gamestyle? Or you tend to be more defensive?
Or maybe, you prefer to use all the available power to crush your opponent?

Each ship has a different gameplay, and between each extremes you will find more balanced ones for those who want to be careful.

Overclock your ship:

You found your favorite but it has some weaknesses? Or you want to make a specific thing stronger?
Use chipsets to boost a specific statistic of your ship, you can use up to 3 different chipsets at the same time to get your secret sauce.

Musical universe

All the game is rythmed by the original creations of LukHash.
He defines his music as a “fusion of the numeric 8 bits sounds combined to a sophisticated electronic music, with modern sounds, and an aesthetic from the 80’s”.
Discover one of his last album “Better Than Reality” in Pongarena.

Want to support the composer? You can buy the album on our Steam page.

Twitch events, contests and streaming

Join our community on Discord and Twitch.
Stay updated about the game development progress and come watch us write some magic code.

Win nice perks during the ongoing events and contests in which you might find yourself in a live battle versus Pongarena devs!

MINIMAL SETUPOS: Ubuntu
Processor: Intel Core 2Memory: 2048 MB RAMNetwork: Broadband Internet connectionStorage: 250 MB available space
Memory: 2048 MB RAMNetwork: Broadband Internet connectionStorage: 250 MB available space
Storage: 250 MB available space

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