Big big major update to a lot of aspects of the game. There are no new major features, but lots of changes to existing aspects. Lots of thanks to 26dollar on Discord for their extensive feedback that helped make this update possible.

I've tried my best to test this as much as possible but there may be lingering bugs or issues, please let me know if they pop up! There's so much changed that I'm bound to have missed something.

Changelog:

• Player
  • Player now uses luftrausers-style recharging health. They have 5 health, take 1 damage from enemies and 2 from overheating, and also can’t heal while overheating or boosting
  • Player invulnerability time decreased from 3 seconds to 0.5
  • Player can no longer boost while not thrusting (Didn’t make sense to anyway, as boosting like this had a very slow acceleration to max speed)
  • Player now has better overheat effects
  • Player boost explosion requirement increased from 5 to 7 enemies
  • Player boost explosion now looks better visually, and makes the player invulnerable when using it
  • Player can now flip direction by tapping s
  • Player now has a bar to show temperature, and also little particles when close to overheating
• Enemy
  • Fixed bug that was causing many enemy interactions to not work - the player boost explosion now kills enemies, and the shielder shields enemies again (Oops)
  • Added finished orbiter visuals, it also gradually flashes its warning line faster the closer it is to firing the laser
  • Shielder still doesn’t have a sprite, but has a small extra visual to shielded enemies
  • Wanderer has a permanent chance on spawning to behave differently. In this state, its target angle will be towards the player + some random deviation, rather than totally random
  • Charger has a permanent chance on spawning to behave differently. In this state, it’ll arc towards the player
• Boss
  • Boss now reacts visually to damage in its unshielded state
  • Boss now has a health bar (With a cool little intro and boss name
  • Boss shielded phase now has some new cool stuff going on
  • Boss unshielded phase now has harder attacks
  • Boss now has a wider variety of attacks, attacks are a little better structured and also balanced better
  • Boss phase health increased from 30 to 50
  • Stickers now behave slightly differently
  • Only some enemies spawned by the boss restore ammo
  • Enemies that the boss spawns which restore ammo now have a visual indicator to help them stand out
  • Boss will stop spawning enemies after a cap to reduce lag. Most likely a temporary solution, currently there’s no indicator as to when this is happening
  • Set up a proper palette group system so the bosses use unique palettes that can’t otherwise be picked when the palette is changed on boost kill
  • Probably lots of other little boss tweaks I’m missing
  • In general the boss attacks are a bit better structured and it just looks nicer. It fires enemies less, and due to the time limit you might have to balance keeping enemies alive so you can get their ammo. Further adjusting and testing will probably be needed to make sure it’s fun, but my initial tests are positive
• Menu
  • Menu properly skips to the next selectable element if more than 2 un-executable elements exist above/Below the current element within the list (Dont worry about it)
  • Fixed the menu background not scrolling smoothly and also looping incorrectly
  • Removed level 2 and 3 from the menu to avoid confusion
  • Edited readme text
  • Gameover screen now shows gameover reason (AKA the reason you died)
• Miscellaneous
  • Brought back the 3 minute time limit. On bosses, this is set to 1 minute per phase
  • Bullets now use deltatime (Oops)
• And lots of other little tweaks and changes that I’m probably missing
• Current issues:
• Changing from fullscreen to windowed and vice versa removes particles until the game is restarted. Not all effects use particles, so some will still appear
• The current timer implementations may not be a 100% fool proof way to remove the secret strategy, feedback is appreciated on this
• No depth system. Should be a priority as it will help improve readability a lot
• There are currently lingering collision issues that I’m looking into, resulting in phantom collisions/No collisions in specific circumstances. I might have to move to another collision library to test/Fix it, which might not happen by the next demo release as there are other priorities. For the most Partit’s fine, the number one instance to look out for is standing too close to the boss, as the extra large collider is one of the culprits

The next updates will continue to be little changes as the demo is pretty much feature complete. There are a few lingering features I need to add too.