Patch Notes - October 15th

A New Objective

Heyo it's me iStead, another build has been launched and with it we got a new set of patch notes for you guys. Some big gameplay changes with this one and some more UI improvements, without further ado:

Game Changes

Objectives

The meat and potatoes of this update: previously every time you entered a room, waves of enemies would spawn at you. We felt this led to a repetitive gameplay loop where every room felt the same and combat became stale as runs went on. So with this update we've introduced 4 new objectives that may play when entering a room.

-Eliminate

This is the standard room objective we've had in the past, where waves of enemies will spawn until they are all defeated.

-Target Practice

Melded Eyes will spawn throughout the room. They don't like being shot at and doing so will cause them to retract. Shoot them all to continue on to the next room.

-Scavenger Hunt

Keycards will spawn throughout the room at various points. Collecting all of them will unlock the room.

-Capture Point

A circle will spawn at a point in the room. Stand in it to slowly gain capture progress. Killing enemies while in the circle will give additional progress.

These new objectives will also show up in game underneath the health bar, updating you on your progress as you get closer to finishing them. The encounter in each room is chosen randomly and determined by the map seed, meaning that rerunning the same seed will result in the same sequence of encounters.

New Enemy - Gunner

A Lazin Breacher that's picked up a minigun, he'll fire a burst of bullets at you before repositioning.

Spawn Parameters

We've reworked how we choose which enemies to spawn in a room to make the experience more consistent and customizable. To start, we split all of the enemies into three categories: normals (e.g. melee and flying enemies), heavies (e.g. snipers, breachers, and gunners), and supports (e.g. hearth bots and wizards). We have a spawn rate set for each at each difficulty: in general, more heavies and supports spawn at higher difficulties. When spawning a wave of enemies in each room, we try to match the spawn rate as close as possible, so there's no more chance of getting a room of entirely wizards for instance. When an enemy dies in a non-elimination encounter, it is replaced by another enemy of the same class after a delay.

Visual Changes

-Popup Section

The popup section has been added to the righthand of the screen and will display resource pickups, level ups, and internally it's where we find out whether or not we turned cheats on.

-Resource Pickups

The resource icons have been added into the game. A stacking number will appear alongside them as you pick up multiple.

-End Screen Changes

Resources have been changed on the end screen to show their new icons, alongside how many of them you picked up during a run. Now it should be clear how many goodies you picked up.

-Dialog Box Move

Thrill's dialog box got moved to the top right corner of the screen, alongside a new visual update for it!

-Floor 1 Lighting Update

Several of the rooms were extremely dark and almost impossible to see properly in. We did a pass through and updated all the lighting in them so you should be able to spot your pilot's toes now.

- How HP VFX update

The "blood splatter" effect that you see at low health now pulses in and out, making for a more dynamic effect while also not obscuring the screen as much.

-Explosion Transparency

Made explosions partially transparent, making for better visibility.

Additional Changes/Fixes

• Fixed doors not always showing up on the minimap

• Lowered the damage on the sniper enemy

• Fixed some issues with the default mech loadout when playing for the first time

• Improved flying enemy pathing, making them less likely to get caught on things

Social

In an effort to increase visibility for Star-Coat, we're trying to expand our studio's social media presence. You can find our first trailer on Youtube here:

You can also find an invite to our playtest Discord server here: https://discord.gg/Pj8v4VBZE9

And that's all we got for you today, we got a few more things moving under the hood that we're looking to share with you guys soon. For now, we hope you enjoy the new objectives and fighting the new enemy. As always if you have any questions or notice any funny or unfunny bugs, please share them with us over on the Discord.

Until next time,

-iStead