Hello everyone! Did you know that whenever we release our patch notes, it meant that the update is coming next week? If not, then now you know it! Update 0.5.0 will come on October 3, be prepared to face new stuff and everything that's changing with the patch!
Additions
Added a small knockback on melee impact so players will less occur body overlaps when using close combat weapons.
Added mission 12 and 13 and HG4. This now concludes Chapter 2 of the story. We'll prepare a manifesto next week to explain what we're doing next going forward.
Added various new weapon parts for both close combat and ranged weapons.
Added a new Bullet Shooter firing method: Detonator, slow firing pod that stick to the ground or your enemies and explode after a few seconds dealing high amount of damage.
Added a new Energy Shooter firing method: Wave, a low damage full knockback weapon that pierces through every enemy it hits.
Added new photography mode poses into the game.
Added new photography mode backgrounds that can be unlocked after clearing some story missions.
Improvements
Improved strafe-firing animations.
Improved descriptions to specific nodes such as ones that unlocked new Quantum Break forms.
Improved optimization on mission 11 "Tempestuous Sector"
Sound effects upgrade for attacks. They now vary more from each other.
Physics collider has been updated, players will now have a better time in close combat attacks with new modules that prevent players from accidentally moving into enemies' body. Animations have also been improved to reflect the module usage.
Improved Quarks texture.
Changes
Reduced elite enemies' effective HP.
Added shields to some enemies.
Changed enemies' damage scaling and some behavior. Elite Quarks should now be much more challenging in Very Hard without higher HP or damage, but more attack patterns and aggressive AI.
Lowered Empowering Void's Void Crystals Durability by around 40% in Normal and 25% in Very Hard difficulty.
Reduced the health of most enemies to almost the same amount as their normal difficulty counterpart. This will also reduce its SHIELDS and thus will make the regenerated shields during bosses' "stagger" state not as annoying as before.
ONCE AGAIN, enemies' and players' status are rebalanced. This is an experimental work that involves almost every node available in-game to provide a more consistent progression to players.
Changed various tech nodes that provided damage or defense buffs to nodes that promotes a certain playstyle through drastic status changes. You'll mostly see these at the Tier 5 nodes.
Changed more nodes to effect ACCELERATION balancing, it is now more difficult to reach maximum ACCELERATION without using dedicated ACCELERATION nodes, but those nodes will provide higher ACCELERATION as well.
Lowered the number of lightning strikes in mission 11 "Tempestuous Sector"
Bug Fixes
Fixed missing localization and missing texts.
Some parts that have missing paintable sub-elements or sub-elements that don't work can now be painted. If you still encounter these, please notify us so we can fix it.
Fixed a critical bug that prevents certain blueprints from dropping for certain players.
Fixed texture bug that causes higher resolution textures to not load on settings other than ULTRA.
Fixed a decal related bug that prevents players from applying decals #5-8 on various pieces of weapons and armors
Fixed Slayer OS description to show correctly unless it decides to be sentient and not show up once again.
Fixed a bug that forces the player character to jitter forward after a boost.
Known Bugs - There are bugs that made us not push forward with PROPERTY DAMAGE changes in this update. They still retain their 0.4.5 values.
WIP: New Pose Representing 1 Year Anniversary
As time passes and the new update looms, we'd like to show you one something that was questioned outside the AMA, are new poses coming to 0.5.0.? Of course there will be! Here is one of them to celebrate our 1 year anniversary, which might look like something some of you requested... To those askings update when? We can only say soon!
Join discord: http://discord.gg/quS7E46
1 Year Anniversary AMA Session
Today marks the 1 year anniversary since M.A.S.S. Builder’s Early Access release. Thank you to Kickstarter backers and over 50,000 of you who made this a reality. Look forward to more from us as we continue to diligently work on the game!
Also here is our representative answering the questions that you've sent in during the past few days, enjoy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xT_z8FDVmM
Announcement: Taking AMA questions for our anniversary!
It's going to be M.A.S.S. Builder's anniversary on the upcoming September 13th! We wanted to do something for you all but we're quite full-on working for the next update so here's what we gonna do. We'll open an AMA session, you ASK US ANYTHING on any of our social media or the steam news post, we'll collect all questions for 48 hours starting now and answer them on September 13th. Take note, we can only understand Thai and English so if you asked us in other languages, we'll Google Translate your questions!
Deal? Great! Now fire all the questions at us!
WIP: Close Combat Weapon Parts - Claw
Hello everyone! We're in September now and still working on the 0.5.0 update. There are still a few things that made us not ready to release it yet, but we're compensating for the lateness with some requested contents. Thus, today we'll show you a small preview of new close combat weapon parts, CLAWS. We hope you like them!
WIP: M.A.S.S. Enemy Effects and AI
Hello everyone! Last week, we've showed you how a bullet hell can happen with enemy M.A.S.S. but what about Melee attacks? Well, we're currently tuning that alongside melee combos that would also allow players to retaliate. We tried having them behave as human-like as possible, with no limits and fully calculated AI-lock-on and had found out the insane levels of difficulty it created. We've heard some requests to keep a difficulty VERY HARD though, so maybe we'll keep that in our highest difficulty, who knows?
Also, we've been messing with the new effects of M.A.S.S. units being destroyed. Did you like how they explode? There are only a few weeks until our next update and we hope you're excited about this type of battle we're creating!
WIP: M.A.S.S. Enemy Units
Hello everyone! We've got some exciting screenshots to show today, of something that's been in development for a good while now, M.A.S.S. type enemies and M.A.S.S. vs. M.A.S.S. combat. This is a feature much requested and we knew that half-heartedly creating an AI for them would not yield good results, but not teasing them would be a crime when we're so far working on them.
So here they are in an unfinished form. As you can see it's currently almost a bullet hell and impractical to battle against a group like this if everything you all can see is explosions. But let us say this, the final form will surely come by to every one of you in 0.5.0, and we'll make it fun.
Join discord: http://discord.gg/quS7E46
WIP: Shooter Weapon Animation Improvement
Hey everyone! If you've been following our social media, you might have noticed a midweek progress sneak peek in the past few days regarding how we're testing new animations. Today, we're excited to show you how the results of that experiment came out. These upcoming improvements to animations will be for you all to play with when the next update arrives. Stay tuned for more updates, 0.5.0 will be coming soon.
WIP: Upcoming Detonator Parts
Hello everyone! It's a busy week for us working on the upcoming update and today's WIP will be another short one. Shown here are some parts that'll be released alongside it with the new shooters coming for the new detonator firing method. Look forward to the update!
WIP: Underground Factory Level Design
Welcome back to another short WIP update this week, featuring an upcoming level and tileset design.! It mainly features a large area of metal structures, inner works of something resembling a factory itself, and what you're seeing here is only a portion that we have not yet finished adding details into. We hope you will look forward to it, as it will bring on a new and different type of enemy for you all to face.
