Shapebreaker
Announcing the first price increase
I am hereby announcing the first price increase 2 weeks in advance as promised on the Steam Store page. On September 29 the price of the game will increase from $2.99 to $3.99 or €2.39 to €3.29. This change will also affect other currencies in a similar fashion.
This will not affect anyone who has already purchased the game.
Thank you all for the support!
Alexander
Update v0.4.1
Version 0.4.1 is now live. Just some bugfixes.
Patch notes:
• Fixed a bug that caused items to not be clickable.
• Fixed a bug that caused escape menu to be rendered in front of shop items in the shop screen.
Got any feedback? Help improve the game by sharing by pressing F8 in-game, on the discussion forums on Steam or on Discord.
Enjoy!
Alexander
Update v0.4.0
Version 0.4.0 is now live. Each map now rewards you with Credits upon completion. You will encounter a Shop in each Act where you can spend your hard earned Credits on cards, items and.... card removal! I would love to hear your feedback on these changes.
Patch notes:
• You now start with 50 Credits.
• Each map will reward you with Credits after completion.
• Each Act now contains a Shop. The Shop always offers you 2 tower cards, 2 element cards, 1 other type card, 2 items and card removal in exchange for Credits.
• Added new visuals for displaying map nodes and Shop nodes in the Act screen.
• Maps now have 33% chance to reward you with an item upon completion instead of being a guaranteed reward.
• Added a message that will be displayed on the main screen when an outdated save has been detected.
• Fixed a typo in the description of the Battery curio.
Got any feedback? Help improve the game by sharing by pressing F8 in-game, on the discussion forums on Steam or on Discord.
Update v0.3.17
Version 0.3.17 of the game is now live. This is the post-competition update. I've added the curio Scrap recycler designed together with competition winner Chuckjirka. I've Also made some changes based on the dominant strategy and bugs exposed by the competition.
Chuckjirka was looking forward to providing the Berserk element with some way to scale up. Chuckjirka also really likes effects that trigger when your deck is reshuffled. We combined these two ideas and thus Scrap recycler was born!
Patch notes:
• Added a new curio Scrap recycler. The curio increases the current and maximum life of your core by 1 each time your deck is reshuffled into your draw deck.
• The Frost tooltip now properly indicates that Frost can stack on shapes. This was originally a bug but is now a feature.
• Increased the duration of Frost from 0.75 seconds to 1 second and decreased the slow effect from 30% to 25%. This averages out to a small improvement.
• Frost now has 50% reduced duration on bosses.
• Decreased the attack speed bonus of Moon from 30% to 25%.
• Reduced the health of Vessel shapes and shapes spawned by Vessel shapes by 5%.
• Added an extra key binding for changing game speed: The + and - keys.
• Opening the escape menu during a wave now pauses the game.
• Fixed a bug that caused cards drawn to be different before and after opening a saved playthrough.
Got any feedback? Help improve the game by sharing by pressing F8 in-game, on the discussion forums on Steam or on Discord.
Early Access: First month
I'm back from my holiday & fully recharged.
It's been a month now since the game released in Early Access on Steam on July 19. Some statistics:
• 1000 copies have been sold.
• 22 reviews with 90% positive rating.
• 2200 wishlists so far.
These stats are amazing and it really is a dream come true! Thanks everyone for all the feedback and support. Keep it coming!
What do we have coming up in the next updates?
• A curio designed together with competition winner chuckjirka.
• The ability to remove cards from your deck and other fun stuff from the roadmap. You can find the roadmap on the Discussion forums and on Discord.
Got any feedback? Help improve the game by sharing by pressing F8 in-game, on the discussion forums on Steam or on Discord.
Enjoy!
Alexander
Update v0.3.16
I'm technically still on holiday until August 20, but I managed to sneak in a bit of development time.
I was very positively overwhelmed by all the bug reports send with the in-game feedback tool. Those helped a lot. Thanks all!
Patch notes:
• Added the names of the Early Access competition winners to the source code. More info about this can be found here.
• Fixed a bug that caused items to not be usable when multiple spawn points were present and shapes from one spawn point were already cleared.
• Fixed a bug that sometimes caused tower information to be shown partially out of screen on 16:10 resolution.
• Fixed a bug that caused selected cards to be playable even if escape menu was active.
• Fixed a typo in the Burn card.
Got any feedback? Help improve the game by sharing feedback by pressing F8 in-game, on the discussion forums on Steam or on Discord.
Enjoy!
Alexander
Competition winners share their approach
Our Early Access competition winners were nice enough to share a few words about their build, approach and thoughts. Let's take a look at how they managed to win the competition.
🥉Gundam919🥉
"In the game's current state, Moon remains the strongest support type element. Placing 4 towers side by side grant a bonus of 120% attack speed, which unlike any other elements, increases the total damage dealt significantly, especially for towers with other elements.
Alongside the Lucid tower, this can buff damage to other nearby lucid towers to 88 DPS with 4 Moon elements at max damage modules. Combine this with frost to slow the boss to 25% of their move speed for x4 more time to do damage, and it can quickly get out of hand.
Finally, any card that let’s just draw 2 extra cards is essential for getting the cards you need, as Splash card in your deck is completely useless, and the Basic towers are inherently worse than the Lucid tower due to their lower range and module cap. Every card that lets you draw 2 cards is effectively +1 more card you're cycling through your hand. For reference, it takes 2 turns by default to cycle the deck.
Oh, and the +1 energy and -1 module curio is best for generalized builds, while +1 on deck cycle holds the strongest potential the more you can draw."
🥈TimotheusRex🥈
Cards in deck: 5 × Basic Tower, 4 × Damage Mod, 3 × Lucid Tower, 1 × Splash Mod, 1 × Moon, 1 × Sun, 1 × Overload, 1 × Weakest Target/card draw, 1 × Bonus Energy
Curio: +1 energy/turn, -1 max mod each tower
“I'd take Frost over Sun if given the choice, but Frost didn't even appear during my run. Card draw was also completely absent in this run. I would've preferred more card draw. The 3 Lucid Towers basically enabled the run because their extra range ensured aura and damage application. The extra Lucid Towers also at least partially mitigated the lack of card draw. My tower placement was probably suboptimal, but I'm not too sure how much additional score I would've been able to milk this run by arranging them vertically instead of horizontally. I would've saved 2-3 energy that I could've used for elements or damage mods.
It was by far the best run I had in about 50 runs. I stopped most of my runs after the first boss because of suboptimal cards and Curio choices.”
🥇chuckjirka🥇
Cards: Starter cards + 2 moon auras, 1 frost aura, 1 extra energy, 2 draw cards (Weakest or Strongest, I’m not sure but that doesn't matter), 1 rapid fire, 1 range 3 turret (I think it was sniper, but could have been a slingshot as well)
Curio: draw 1 extra card per turn
“The Rapid Fire Tower was there mostly for stacking Frost, thanks to so many Moon auras a single rapid fire kept the boss in place for a long time. Overall, the cards I got were more or less perfect and wouldn't change them at all. The utility cards would probably be overshadowed by extra range 3 turret and extra Moon and Frost, but that would be really ridiculous. As for curio the only 2 that make sense are the extra energy and extra draw ones, I personally prefer extra draw, since the energy one limits module capacity which is necessary for high dps when combined with moon and because extra mana is unreliable: If you get bad draw you use the mana in a mediocre way or not at all. Meanwhile extra draw makes you cycle through the deck much faster, getting you much more auras and better turrets for the layout). Since I drew 6 per turn and had 4 extra draws total in deck (2 draw cards *2) and deck has a total of 18 cards, I ran through my deck more than 3 times. Unfortunately, I only drew 3 frosts instead of 4 so I actually dealt a bit less damage than I could have. I think the max possible damage is probably close to 20000.
I can't share the exact layout, but if you look at the score I submitted you can see that I just made a horizontal line into another horizontal line, then I blocked the bottom with 1 basic turret to make the path redirect and stay close to the turrets in the middle of the map.
The basic turret at top was there to redirect the path to stay in range of another Frost Rapid Fire Tower, I don’t remember why I placed it there, but it was probably to make it benefit from many Moon auras”
Closing thoughts
All 3 competition winners have been eternalized in the source code of the game and received their role with bragging rights on our official Discord Server.
Competition winner chuckjirka and I are currently designing a new card, enemy, curio or item to add to the game. It will be included in one of the next Shapebreaker updates. Stay tuned!
I really enjoyed organizing this competition. It has been a lot of fun for the competitors and myself. I will definitely be organizing more competitions in the future, during Early Access as well as after full release.
Enjoy!
Alexander
Holiday August 1-20
I will be out of the country on holiday with my family from August 1 until August 20. I definitely have some conflicting feelings about it. The Early Access release has brought in a lot of players, feedback and requests for new content & features. I am very happy with the EA release and would love to keep up momentum & keep working on new stuff.
Unfortunately this is almost the only time in the year that I can go on holiday with my family, which is also important. I'll do my best to go online from time to time and respond to questions & requests.
I'm very much looking forward to continuing the development of the game after my holiday. I believe we have a very nice thing going here and I look forward to our journey towards full release and beyond!
Alexander
Update v0.3.15
Version 0.3.15 of the game is now live. I've added the much requested Save-game feature. Thanks for all the feedback so far. Keep it coming!
Patch notes:
• The game now saves between maps. Saved games can be loaded by choosing the Continue button om the main menu screen.
• A playthrough is now generated based on a seed. The seed is now displayed on the bottom right of the screen during a run. This does not currently affect players but it allows me to more easily recreate situations based on bug reports.
Got any feedback? Help improve the game by sharing by pressing F8 in-game, on the discussion forums on Steam or on Discord.
Enjoy!
Alexander
Competition winners
The competition has ended and I am happy to announce our winners!
🥇 chuckjirka : 16728
🥈 TimotheusRex: 14074
🥉 Gundam919: 13248
Congratulations to our top 3 competitors! These scores are amazing.
Winners will receive the following rewards:
• 🥇 Design a new card, curio, enemy or boss with me
• 🥇🥈🥉 Your name or nickname permanently added to the source code of the game
• 🥇🥈🥉 Role @competition-winner with bragging rights on this Discord server for a full month
Each of these rewards is optional. Each winner can choose to take all, any combination or none of their rewards. I very much enjoyed the competition and would look forward to organizing one again in the future. Should something change for future competitions? Let me know in the comments.
Multiple winners have already accepted my invitation to share a peek into their approach or build for the competition. Stay tuned!