Update: Full Release (1.0) - Lots of additions and changes!
It's finally here! After a little over three years my wee game is fully released!
Full version is going out a bit early to folks who've already purchased it but it'll go on sale at 9 am PST tomorrow (the 11th) so hold out till then if you want a good deal.
Here's what's been changed or added in the 1.0 update:
Intro Story
I am really excited for you all to experience this. To be honest when I started this whole project I didn't have a story in mind at all but I'm proud I was able to craft something that feels this grounded and solid. The introduction is a bit of a different approach to story telling than typical cinematic openings so I hope you find it enjoyable and immersive.
The Tenth Playable Ship
I'm calling this the 4-1 ship and it may be my favorite design. It's incredibly versatile but still tricky to get full value out of so I'm very excited to see how you all use it. You'll be able to find this ship in the last region of the game and each other ship will "shift" down a region from their current unlock area.
Game Mechanic Updates
Progression upgrades
I'm pretty happy with how the Surge system brings a lot of optional difficulty to the game but I'm still a bit disappointed about the completion rate of the base game. So I'm adding some statistical progression to the base game. Just a wee bit! As you play and level your progression score you'll unlock various power upgrades to all ships. There's a handful of these and they are relatively minor each but add up to a significant power jump if you obtain them all. They are all obtained relatively early on in the progression levels and I've significantly reduced how much each level takes to progress with these additional levels. My hope is this helps players who are struggling grind through a bit more and are eventually able to complete the game without too much tampering with the balance of Surge levels.
Upgrade Rerolls
Not hitting a few key upgrades can really make a run flounder. I want to give players a bit more agency over this so I've added an option to reroll upgrades (if you have the credits for it!). This should make it much easier to nab that favorite upgrade that just makes your build sing.
Gear Container Rerolls
It felt like "optimal" play to only reroll the lowest tier containers, because there's a chance to downgrade if they are higher. This feels a bit limiting as far as choices go. It already costs a fair amount to reroll containers so having a double penalty just feels really bad. So I got rid of it! Rerolling will either do nothing or upgrade and occasionally it will double upgrade! The upgrade that removed the downgrade make it have better odds at upgrading. Hopefully this will be more fun all around and give a lot more strategic choices to gear containers.
New Content
- 4 new upgrades + 1 new starter upgrade - 4 new weapons - New system augment. - 2 more surge levels (10 total now) - 1 new consumable item - Three new localisations: Turkish, Hungarian and Polish
Quality of Life Improvements
- Added a few tip screens for some less intuitive mechanics. - Loadout will display on pause during a run. - Interface/display size toggling without exiting the game - Cloud saves enabled cross browser. - Fire asteroids are outlined in red making them much easier to see and avoid. - Added another larger level to UI scaling for those of you with tiny pixels ;). - System select will show how augments effect civilian counts.
Balance changes
- Systems with "Hazard Detected" have significantly less hazards that spawn. - Lots of small tweaks to various weapons to make some less powerful weapons stronger. - Starformer's ability has been tweaked slightly. Less missiles will fire but it'll slash swords at frequent intervals around it. - Shield breaker ships will spawn more consistently in surge level 3. You should have one spawn roughly every 4 waves rather than a completely random chance for every wave.
A few changes focused on adding some more functionality to a few under powered upgrades. - Long range scanner: added ability to see enemy traps in the system - Fire/acid immunity upgrades: both will increase the amount of damage fire or acid do while making your ship immune to their respective element. - Several starter upgrades increased in power level (I want these to still be "build around" upgrades but they were starting to be a little weak in comparison to others). - Upgrades that drop pickups will spit them further if you are going faster so you don't have to back track to pick them up.
In later regions it's pretty easy to stagnate with resources if you get an unlucky roll on the ratio of uninhabited to inhabited. These changes should make that scenario far less likely as it'll be easier to find sources. - Uninhabited planets have a higher floor of possible asteroids that circle them and will gain more asteroids on average as you move through regions. - Asteroid resource rewards will increase slightly as you move through the regions.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed an issue where having two controller/devices hooked up would cause the controls to not function. - Fixed an issue where system civilian count wouldn't display properly on system select.
Full release will be January 11th!
Yup the game has a full release date! I'm excited to announce that the game will come out in it's "full"(though likely not final) release on January 11th, 2022!
Here's a sneak peak at what's going to be in the final update going into the full release:
Intro Story - I am really excited for you all to experience this. I won't give away too much at this time but here's a one of the "sections" below
The tenth playable ship
Progression upgrades - Just a wee bit! As you play and level your progression score you'll unlock various power upgrades to all ships.
Upgrade Rerolls
Changes to Upgrade Rerolls - Changing up the strategy around rerolling containers as they will no longer downgrade.
New Content- New surge levels (10 total now), weapons, upgrades, consumable items.
Lots of quality of life improvements.
Lots of balance changes.
As many bug fixes that I can fit in.
Want to try it now? It's on the beta branch! I'll be pushing in-development versions to the "full-version" branch on Steam (Windows only atm). Switch over to try it out.
Dev Update: The road to 1.0
Hey folks, I wanted to share an update with you on the progress of the 1.0 update.
Intro Story
I'm putting a lot of work into this and I'm really hoping it's a good way to ground players into the game world as much as possible. It's taking a lot longer than I anticipated, mostly because it's a lot of bespoke art pieces. Rest assured they are coming along. Here's a few individual "scenes" to spark your interest:
New Ship!
There will be a 10th ship in the 1.0 update! This is a bit of a 4 in 1 ship. Highly versatile and contains a lot of nuance that I hope will make for interesting choices. I won't spoil too much about it but I'm excited to get it out to you all.
Loadout Display
I wanted to add this feature for so long but always had bigger fish to fry. I'm really excited to announce that you'll be able to view your full loadout when you pause anytime in game. This gives you access to a lot of details about ship ability, weapons and upgrades that you can use to make decisions throughout your runs. Here's how it'll look:
Steam Deck Compatibility
I recently got a Deck and have good news: the game runs very well there! I'm fairly confident it's at least "Playable" state if not "Verified" according to Steam. The problem is Steam won't review it until it's my time in line which may be a while since it seems like they tend to be verifying popular games rapidly. So I can't give an ETA on when that will happen, it's up to the powers that be at Valve.
Timeline
While I haven't set a firm date I'm pretty confident that I'll be shipping the 1.0 version before the end of the year. I'll likely be wrapping up a bunch of development over the next month and setting a release date during that time. Be on the lookout in the coming weeks for the date announcement!
Update - Balance + Twin Stick Alt Controls
Hey folks, I've got a medium sized update for you! I've got a lot of other irons in the fire right now, working on story in the background, some other small features that may or may not flesh out entirely and I'm working a bit on a side project which I hope to share with you all soonish.
Balance & Pacing
I've made quite a few tweaks to adjust the difficulty curve dramatically. Basically I want the later zones to feel significantly less like slog than they do now. I've significantly pulled back on resource costs in later zones to power up shield generators and armor scaling of enemies. As I've stated before I think the base difficulty is still too hard and few people are actually completing it so I'm taking some fairly radical steps to fix this. I want people to feel truly challenged in Surge levels so I've relocated some of the more difficult challenges to those levels. Here's a list of what's changing
Shieldbreakers will not spawn in base levels and have been moved to Surge level 4. These caused some pretty hopeless feeling whiplash if you are caught unaware. Having to repower a single shield generator felt like a death sentence most of the time.
Removed the surge level effect of random Item Containers tiers. This made the game pretty unfun pretty quickly in the surge levels. I decided to replace this with Shieldbreakers as it's still a challenge you can overcome and play around vs just having to have more resources than ever.
Last two regions have had their resource requirements for shield generators severely scaled back.
Most enemies have had their health scaling reduced drastically.
System augment "Hazards" have been scaled back a bit.
Control Schemes
I've received lots of feedback about folks being disappointed this isn't a twin stick shooter. I've listened and understand the sentiment, it's familiar and easy to pick up and play. I do believe the gameplay achieved with P10's current control scheme adds something unique to the game and have pushed back some against twin stick shooter controls. Additionally I always felt it would blow out the balance of the game, that the game with twin stick would be so ridiculously easy I'd have to rebalance a lot of the game. I've been experimenting with twin stick for a bit now and I'm happy to say some of those things were a bit unfounded.
Today the game can be played both the standard way it worked before or with Twin Stick controls as you may be used to from other top down games. When you first start game you'll be asked which you prefer, with a note from myself about why I believe the Standard experience is special. I hope you all are able to enjoy the game whichever way is most comfortable.
Hope you enjoy these updates! More coming soon as I'm working on a lot in the background that I'm really excited to share with you.
Power of Ten is 35% off for Steam Summer Sale!
Hey folks, P10 is in the summer sale at a deep 35% off! Get in there and start saving the universe!
Update - Big Core Content Dump
It's a big one folks. Nearly every game system in the game got a little bit of love in this one.
Frost Status
Introducing a new status element to the game. This can effect both players and enemies so be careful. Slows ships effected to a crawl making them easier to pick off. This status is sprinkled throughout the game in several ways and will continue to be added in the future:
New enemies with frost status
New weapons with frost status
Rainbow weapons shoot frost projectiles as well and cost more ammo to fire
Frosty traps around planets in later regions
Content
Three new surge levels to conquer (up to 8 total now)
New system augment: System Hazard
Two new variations of station events have been added.
Clearer instructions on how to complete the defense station events.
Two new upgrades.
Quality of Life
Items have had their hit boxes significantly reduced, this should make it easier to "target" specific items without having to pick up or scrap overlapping items before you can get to the others.
The mini map has a better indication when the system is being attacked.
Regions with "Deadeye Presence Detected" will show the Deadeye fleet's position on the map.
Traders will attempt to avoid enemy ships to not take collateral damage as much.
Improved the readability of ships that are being healed by other ships.
Weapons that are deadly to players will show a indication of the area they are deadly.
Added more translated strings + new language option (Spanish (Spain))
Balance
Tac T Ion has an additional max armor to start and cooldown of drone ability reduced by 1 second.
Fliiboi's shield charge rate increased slightly and max charge before breaking reduced slightly.
Charging area for station defense events increased slightly.
Reduced scaling of Deadeye transports.
Reduced scaling of small slow moving missile ships so that they take much longer to require multiple hits to kill.
Fixes
Fixed an issue where loading a run would spawn additional progression upgrades.
Fixed an issue where loading a run would mess with the wave spawning timers.
Fixed an issue with Overload upgrade's second level not assigning fire rate increases.
Overload's visuals have been reworked to not be so strobe like.
Fixed a crash when you opened a weapon and equipped it immediately causing the object to fail a check later on.
Update on Early Access Progress
Good news! We are getting really close to moving out of early access. I have one more milestone feature I want to add which is the story elements to the beginning and end of the game. I think the way players are introduced to the universe this is set in is pretty weak right now and would like to ground them a bit more. I also think the ending feels a bit anti-climatic, final boss feels really good but the way it wraps up after that feels a bit mediocre, in my opinion. So I'm going to spend several weeks focusing on how I want to relay those story beats.
Additionally I want scope out Switch development a bit more, mostly to see how much work it's going to be to port. Ideally I'd like to launch the Switch version with the release into full version but I want to make sure that's a realistic goal before I commit to it.
I'm excited to be so close to fully releasing this game! I'm hoping you are too.
A few bug fixes
This update fixes a few bugs: * Fixed a lock up that happened when multiple planet attacking enemies would spawn without enough targets. * Fixed a visual bug with buffs causing their visuals to be too large. * Angry alien will drop some compensation if you do manage to kill it.
Update - The one with the fungrades
Hey folks, Steam's Going Rogue fest has a few more days so left! Make sure you pick the game up while it's 30% off! The fest has been going great for me, so many new people playing the game! So I wanted to get a mid sized update out quickly to you all to address a few points of feedback I've heard with this flux of new players. Check it out:
Fungrades
So I've heard some feedback that most upgrades don't seem very fun. I was curious about this so I looked back at the list of upgrades and realized... they are right! I've been a bit cautious about adding combat power upgrades into the game and honestly my justifications for that have been a little weak. So I spent some time whipping up a ten new upgrades which specifically do some pretty crazy stuff in combat. Additionally I've pruned away a few upgrades that just felt like bad choices most of the time so that these new upgrades appear more frequently.
I still think utility upgrades have their place in the game and can be very good in their own right but I want the player to really feel like their ship is growing more powerful as a run progresses and I don't think that's the case right now. So my plan is to add one "combat" related upgrade for every utility upgrade I add to the game, to make sure there's a good mix.
Other tweaks/fixes
Fixed a visual bug with enemy beams.
Fixed a crash when a weapon item was opened in specific scenarios.
Modular ship armor scales a little less.
Added more juice to the player taking damage along with a sound effect.
You can open the map while warping.
Picking up buffs no longer does a full screen flash. Added a sound effect to picking up a buff.
Reduced the max amount of debris that drop and stay around.
Power of Ten is 30% off!
Hope your week is going great! Power of Ten has been featured in the Going Rogue festival and I've given it a deep discount at 30%. Pick up the game today and join the festivities!
I recently launched a huge update to the game as well! Check out the update notes and see what's new. I really am looking forward to who figures out how to tame the mysterious beast!
If you want to get more frequent updates about the game join the discord! I'd love to have you. I frequently listen and discuss feedback in there and often players ideas end up in the game! Check out the discord.
Update - New system events, upgrades, weapons and more!
Two big updates in the same month? Absolutely! This one is focusing more on the core game play rather than major features. Additionally the game will be in the upcoming festival and on a pretty nice discount at the same time! Without further ado here's what's new in this version:
New Events
I've added a couple of new events to spice up the game play. You'll find some new space stations (which are all unique in their own ways) throughout the systems that will need your assistance in a couple of ways. They are willing to reward you quite well for your efforts so it's probably worth while helping them out. There's something else I've added to the game but I don't want to spoil the secret.
Core Updates
Four new upgrades. These upgrades have a common theme of making system choices more interesting. Some have positive effects when you travel to new systems some have negative. Others have a bit of mixed back that you can cleverly take advantage of.
Three new weapons.
Balancing
I'm trying to trim back the late game scaling a bit more to make the base level a bit more accessible.
Tuned down the armor scaling on large ships.
The more challenging small enemies will not start spawning in waves so early.
Overload upgrade is gives 50% faster fire rate per stack.
Healing/Shielding enemy ships will rotate around further away from their lead ship, giving you a better chance to separate and kill them.
Quality of Life
Text boxes will responsively move to stay fully onscreen.
Fixes
Fixed a crash where weapons would spawn with an undefined value.
Fixed a crash with an enemy projectile and the player dying.
Challenge: Who can be the first to figure out how to get this lil guy to follow you?
