Polychoron 0.0.9 alpha released
This is quite a big update. There are some pretty noticeable visual improvements like debanding in the web version, increased amount of dynamic lights and more variation in wall textures.
I added a couple of new weapon power-ups that give you temporary extra fire power: The first one adds one extra base weapon and the second one replaces it with a deadly laser beam.
Enemy behavior has also been tweaked. The laser wielding sentry gun is now hiding behind a shield when it's not shooting, so you'll have to wait until it fires the laser beam and deactivates the shield. Other enemies have had their timings slightly adjusted. Let me know if you feel that some enemy is too hard or easy.
Here are the changes since version 0.0.8:
- Added two new unique wall texture variants to serve as landmarks in levels.
- Added laser beam weapon power-up.
- Added extra blaster weapon power-up.
- Added a shield to laser sentry gun to make it vulnerable only when it's shooting.
- Tweaked laser sentry gun shoot/aim timing to be more consistent.
- Added charge sound to laser sentry gun.
- Added more HUD messages to instruct new players.
- Made damage glitch effect fade out slowly while not taking damage.
- Minor tweaking to red flash effect to better show the direction of damage.
- Limit some ship module power-ups to higher levels only.
- Tweaked all enemies to turn a little faster.
- Added a sound to laser beams powering up.
- Made patrolling enemy type a little bit stronger.
- Made all enemies remember player location longer after losing line of sight.
- Tweaked camera shakes to be slightly shorter but more aggressive.
- Trigger temporary glitch effects on nearby "electric" explosions.
- Moved screenshot saving to a separate thread to prevent frame drops.
- Added one more particle layer to explosions to make them "beefier".
- Improved explosion fragment spawning pattern.
- Show HUD messages when reaching major global high score ranks.
- Added a tip showing required scores for a new global high scores.
- Increased the maximum number of simultaneous dynamic lights.
- Added a separate shoot button to touch screen controls (can be hidden in settings).
- Added noise to materials when using GLES2 renderer (web) to hide the ugly banding effect.
- Allow choosing the type of anti-aliasing (MSAA 4/8x, FXAA).
- Disabled anti-aliasing by default.
- Improved HUD scaling and positioning on different aspect ratio screens.
- Redesigned HUD crosshair to indicate destructible enemy objects.
This version uses Godot Engine 3.2.4 release candidate version. This is not ideal but the stable release is likely still weeks away and I need this update out before that. I will set up a maintenance update soon after the stable engine version is available. As far as I know there are no significant open issues that affect Polychoron.
See Polychoron game page for more information. Direct downloads have been updated on Itch.io. Android version update has been uploaded on Google Play and will be available shortly.
Note: The web version is not updated because the host does not yet support the new engine version! I will update it as soon as possible.
Posted on 2021-02-02