Devader
Game Feel Update
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.
Devader 2020
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.
Devader: Post Release Update
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!
Highscores Reactivated
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.
Highscore Issues
Working on finding a fix asap.
Devader Released
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.
Final Update for Release 01.09
- "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!
Update 31.8
- 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
Devader Update 30.8
- 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.
Devader is Localized
- 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