DopeMine Arena
Patch 0.061
-Self Damage pick will no longer stack in consecutive matches.
-Demo will be deactivated in 2 days, will be updated and reactivated next month for Next Fest.
Patch 0.06 Overtime Merged
-Game no longer has a set time limit, contestants can 'Retire' from the pause menu at any time but otherwise fight until they die.
-The negative choices present in the overtime mode are now part of the base game, most of the buffs/debuff selections have been significantly nerfed.
-The new mode needs testing there is a good chance there are bugs and balance issues from the adjustment.
I was looking for a way to balance the initial game mode to still be engaging after getting most/all of the upgrades, at that point it's pretty typical to max out in levels at around 10 minutes and then have 5 minutes of not much happening until the timer expires.
My first attempt was to change the match to time 10 minutes after the first win, which partially worked but I was worried it was too difficult at low 'levels', and I wasn't a fan in general of changing the match timer I know it would be confusing and a bit inconsistent. It occurred to me that "the Overtime setup could handle this" and at that point it clicked for me to make this change.
There are other reasons I think this should be a good change, it should be a more fun game mode with more choices to make, that is no longer gated behind an hour or so of gameplay (typically). Most of the videos about the game so far have not even unlocked Overtime, and even when you do it's another 15 minutes before those choices start kicking in again.
I'd be very interested in any feedback on the change, it seems clear to me that it should be a better setup but I'm curious if anyone feels the old way was better.
Patch 0.053, Loading times improved.
-Loading times improved.
-Dark Viper added to in-game unlocks.
-Minor bugfixes.
Patch 0.052
-Improved sound compression, should improve load times, if anything sounds off with the new settings please let me know.
Patch 0.051, Quit time fixed
-Improved Loading times, hopefully
-Added "Restart" button on death.
I have been having an issue where the loading times are long, and quitting the game in particular was taking a long time (one tester thought his computer was locking up before I put in a quitting screen stating it can take a minute).
Wanderbots did a video on my game today (super excited about that) and one of the comments was complaining about how long it takes to quit and implying that the app might be doing something nefarious (which is a fair take).
I looked into the issue and did solve it, it turns out that it's because I've been loading my game scene asynch when on the menu screen, something that I thought was a good thing to do. I tried it without doing that and just loading the scene directly instead when the Play button is hit, and now the game quits in a few seconds instead of like 30 to a minute.
Changing it did not significantly impact the loading time either as I thought it would. I came across another tip when looking how to improve loading times, and it turns out that a big culprit was the music in the game.
The default setting for sounds is "Decompress on Load" and if you change it to either of the 2 other options it improves loading time. The setup I am using right now is all of my music is set to "Streaming" and my sound effects are "Compress in Memory" with both "Load in background" and "Preload audio data" checked.
Changing these things has significantly improved the loading and quit time.
Patch 0.05, New Weapon!
-Doubled the size of boss power drop to prevent it being stuck in terrain
-Several minor bug fixes.
Demo is available!
Patch 0.046
-Fixed speed issues with ice and overtime buffs.
-Added a bunch more smack talk.
-Added arrow for first chest to make it clear it's a pickup.
-Overtime heads up on first win. gives the player notice they need to win again to unlock it.
-Fixed achievements not triggering, if you are missing achievements you need to reset your progress in settings and unlock them again, sorry.
-Doubled the size of the map and all terrain objects.
Patch 0.045
-Increased size of smack talk
-did some stuff to improve performance