Apologies for the delay in updates, this one has been quite a journey.

This was supposed to be a complete balance pass smoothing out the difficulty through-out the game, but upon playing I encountered some big performance issues and framerate drops. Thus I journeyed down a rabbit hole of profiling, garbage collection and CPU usage. Upon returning to the surface I finished the balance pass and also improved the performance a lot!

Let me start by saying I had great fun. This may seem like an odd thing to say when playing your own game, and if you've ever made a game you'll know just how odd it is. Very rarely can I see past the mountain of incomplete tasks and things that need fixing long enough to enjoy my own creation, but this time I really did and I hope that's a good sign for everyone else.

Just making things a little prettier around our Steam pages...
I made the enemy AI worse... after spending all this time perfecting how they aim I spent this update making them intentionally bad at it. You can now dodge lasers, which is handy. You also get invulnerability when you're boosting at full speed which can be used to tactically avoid some damage. Be warned enemies also get this invulnerability though which makes them harder to kite!

The sector level ranges have increased and the experience earned for destroying enemies has doubled. What this means practically is you'll progress at the same pace as you did before, but you'll level up more often... because levelling up is fun. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Having too much money is less fun, especially in a game where you can't burn it all crafting your perfect weapons just yet. As such you now get half as much from selling equipment, consumables drop less and cost more. Sorry, you'll thank me in the long run.

Speaking of fun, destroying enemies is also fun. We decided to lean in to that a little harder, especially with the performance improvements. There are now twice as many smaller ships, and squadron sizes get bigger the later in to the sector you get. They do less damage, drop less loot and give less experience though so the only real change is more explosions and things to shoot.

If you're running at maximum framerate you likely experienced big framerate drops every 12 seconds or so toward the end of encounters. This has all been fixed now and should be smooth sailing. The one thing I haven't fixed up yet is the lag in the mothership panel, I'll get that in the next update but this one was already long overdue!

Hope you enjoyed all that. Not a lot of content this time but the gameplay feels quite different with these changes so let me know what you think!


New Features / Content

• Boosting 75% max speed or higher now grants invulnerability but disables weapons.
  
• Enemies now also become invulnerable when boosting and will begin doing so at 300m range.
  
• Tutorial popup added to explain boost invulnerability the first time you trigger it.

Balance Changes

• Doubled experience earned from destroying enemy ships.
  
• Adjusted Sector 1 level range to be 1 to 20.
  
• Adjusted Sector 2 level range to be 20 to 35.
  
• Lowered min level of rescue and warzone encounters so players see them sooner.
  
• Sector 2 enemies now have 50% extra damage / hull / shield.
  
• Increased toughness and damage of all enemies slightly.
  
• Made Species-XI 50% tougher and 25% higher damage than other factions.
  
• Species-XI skirmish encounters now require you to destroy all enemies to complete them.
  
• Some enemies are now marked as scouts that only give 50% experience.
  
• Scout scale enemies now fire slower for 50% damage, have 50% health and 50% drop chances.
  
• Number of enemies per encounter now increases with level, mostly with extra scouts.
  
• Erratic movement will now make enemies miscalculate your velocity when aiming projectiles.
  
• Enemies with lasers now take a second to lock on when you come in range or dodge.
  
• Repair rays now only regen 50% of their previous amount.
  
• Mothership now launches 8 x Sparks instead of 5 due to decreased repair rate.
  
• Mothership no longer has turret launchers due to their shorter range.
  
• Friendly Sparks with fleet now only fire 1 Javelin missile at a time when not repairing.
  
• Elite scale enemies now give 400% experience.
  
• Boss scale enemies now give 800% experience.
  
• Halved drop chance of consumables as players were getting far too many for free.
  
• Halved sell price of equipment and increased price of a lot of consumables.
  
• Fixed encounters like bosses may now vary in level depending on their position.

Quality of Life / Accessibility

• Made keyboard binding artwork larger and easier to read.
  
• Enabling auto repair will now instantly repair your equipment.
  
• Auto repair now plays a sound effect when triggered.
  
• Moved hyperdrive jump countdown down slightly so it doesn't overlap player ship.
  
• Increased hull of caches so they take a little longer to break open.
  
• Increased time between periodic attacks on the mothership.
  
• Debug display now shows velocity in m/s.
  
• Debug display now shows the point AI is currently aiming at.

Performance

• Garbage collection of unused memory now only happens during the loading scene.
  
• Default setting is now Fullscreen (Exclusive) for optimal performance.
  
• Fixed framerate drop when music tracks switch between combat and ambient.
  
• Vastly improved performance of language key lookups even when using English.
  
• Reduced amount of garbage generated to memory from various methods.
  
• Massively improved performance of target scanning by all ships.
  
• Reduced frequency turrets, drones and repair ships scan for new targets.
  
• Optimized enemy counting in encounters that were causing framerate drops.
  
• Optimized method that calculates repulsion between enemies pushing them apart.

Bug Fixes

• Shadow Blight ship is now correctly an Elite.
  
• Bosses no longer attack you before encounter dialog displays.
  
• Fixed music stopping when enemies attack the mothership.
  
• Comparison tooltip no longer shows while dragging items.
  
• Fixed incorrect type icon displaying in corner of empty slots.
  
• Equip weapon tutorial arrow now correctly points to equip button.
  
• Fixed position of achievement tooltip so more central.
  
• Fixed bug where input wouldn't work after skipping tutorial.
  
• Fixed null pointer when some enemy ships spawn.
  
• Fixed slight delay with some sound effects in game.
  
• Fixed tutorial display languages with longer text strings.
  
• Echo now vanishes after her cutscenes rather than hang out in the encounter.
  
• Tesla weapons now stop animating when the game is paused.
  
• Fixed errors when you opt-in to analytics but it fails to initialize.
  
• Rare and legendary item containers will no longer emit particles after collection.
  
• Enemies will now only redeploy turrets if the old ones are out of range.
  
• Turret launchers no longer show the manoeuvrability of turrets.
  
• Fixed bug where some locked Steamdeck settings could be changed from their default.
  
• Removed old physics quality setting as no longer functional.
  
• Fixed issue with starting tutorial ship getting flagged as friendly in UI.
  
• Enemies will no longer hyperdrive jump directly on top of you.
  
• Pulse weapons no longer take out enemy projectiles that should be immune to damage.
  
• Friendly ships in warzones no longer boost off away from you when you boost.
  
• Fixed phantom sprites doing crazy high damage with cryo guns.
  
• Fixed weird issue where repair ships would get stuck trying to repair themselves.

Just a quick hotfix, mostly changes to the demo. If you complete it you'll now get to try out the Skeran ship parts in your ship design before you go. Plus some bug fixes.

Enjoy, see you next update!


New Features / Content

• Skeran parts are now awarded -before- Sector 2 and thus at the end of the demo.
  
• Sector gateways now show as blocked with a barrier if content beyond is restricted.

Quality of Life / Accessibility

• Added wishlist button and demo specific news to main menu (Demo Only).
  
• Added wishlist button to pause menu (Demo Only).
  
• Added wishlist button to end of demo pop up (Demo Only).
  
• Final pop up added on quitting to ask players to wishlist (Demo Only).
  
• Added a review our demo prompt to main menu (Demo Only).
  
• Added note to encounter arrival banner to say when a sector is still under development.
  
• Logo now displays differently in Simplified Chinese due to name change.
  
• Rescue encounters now always pause if dialog is played on entry.
  
• Encounters should now wait until hyperdrive jump animation ends before playing dialog.
  
• Increased size of item stats display due to excessive stats on Auto Stinger Launchers.

Bug Fixes

• Moved hyperdrive jump countdown lower in HUD so it doesn't overlap notices.
  
• Fixed null pointer in GameShip.StartActivating() method.
  
• Fixed item stats mis-aligned when using asian languages.