Edge To Edge Update

v1.0.20 Difficulty Balance, Overdue Fixes, & Extra Polish

In the same way that I like my pizza toppings, this update is edge to edge. Your beginning experience, ending experience, and battles in the middle have all been given some love. Broken and frustrating stuff has been fixed, rebalanced, and optimized. From the first level to the last, the game better appreciates that you chose to play. At least, I hope that’s the feeling you get from it going forward.

One of the major design goals this update was that each time you boot up the game, your experience will start out immediately fun. Even losing a battle (not you, of course, I’m talking to the other players) should now be a little less frustrating when you continue to play because of the effort to implement my attempt at generous, player-centric design ideas. And as a bonus, players on ultrawide displays got some extra love.

Thank you for playing and showing interest in this update!
— Cosmic Misfit Drew

Quick Summary:

Boss battles have been rebalanced.
Start with three lives every play session.
Ending sequence has been fixed up.
HUD ship counter may finally be fixed!
Ultrawide display support upgraded.
And more!

Change Highlights Explained

Boss Battle Balance

The end of the summer was spent mostly on balancing and optimizing the boss battles. In particular, the Slayer and Destroyer battles needed some love. Sometimes their chaos was just more frustrating than fun and at some moments it simply didn’t run smoothly. You should have a much better time in both battles now.

Starting Three Lives

Also worth a note is that each time you boot up the game, your regular campaign run will now start you off with three full lives rather than care how many you had last time. We’ll call this ship build time between play sessions. This is to help avoid a jarring experience with an immediate game over for those in need of a little time to warm up and aren’t into brutal failure. Or maybe it’s just for me.

Ending Sequence Corrections

In the last update, I seem to have introduced a terrible bug where a “demo ending” screen would appear if you beat the final level. This is an embarrasingly bad bug to experience. I’m glad to report that it has been corrected. But I’m baffled that I failed to catch it before publishing the last update. I hope that nobody experienced it save for myself and our good friends Peves. He has helped me discover and test through various terrible bugs and their fixes, so you have him partially to thank for the much better state the game is in today.

On the chance that I’m not the only one who cares, the ending sequence now features a 100% accurate player ship. I was sad when the game shipped without this detail, but it’s finally been done right. Please enjoy!

Finally Fixed?

Did I also finally fix the player ship counter in the HUD to always be accurate? Maybe!

Ultrawide Upgrade

Ultrawide players will now experience a game that properly fills your entire display. Before we only had support for the HUD to expand, but now the player ship and enemies will spawn and move about edge to edge.

Feedback Appreciated

If you discover that any of the changes here, especially so called “improvements” to the difficulty balance, are actually less fun now than in previous builds of the game, please reach out to share your feedback.

Full Change List

Difficulty Balance & Optimization

Now always starting each regular campaign session with three lives, because a quick game over is a real drag on your first boot up of the game after some time.
You will now find a free Supply Boost is dropped on the next encounter during the same run immediately after the player is killed by a boss as a way to avoid a downward spiral of death and frustration.
Delayed the Hammerhead enemy’s first attack on screen.
Prevented bosses from attacking once their final cores are destroyed.
Reduced blackout time for Slayer so it doesn’t just sit there and take a beating for as long.
Nerfed the Destroyer and Slayer boss battles to something still challenging but less brutal. I even reviewed them in Hard Mode and during the Glitch Week event. Several timings and counts were adjusted to balance the chaos.
- Thanks, Peves, for your input on these bosses and challenging modes.
Expanded enemy bullet pools to avoid vanishing attacks, most apparent with the Destroyer.
Reduced errors during boss battles, including several examples of missing references.
Avoiding errors on scene reload after a game over message, especially in the mine region.
Fixed blacked out Slayer drones so that they block enemy blasters.
Ensured all drones are automatically destroyed when the Slayer boss is destroyed.
Improved optimization of those laggy pickups, especially noticed during the Slayer drone battle.

Silly & Long Overdue Fixes

Demo ending screen no longer errantly appears after beating the final level of the full version of the game. This bug arrived in the last update, I believe. (No thanks to the testers for missing this one! Where were you? lol I guess I missed it, too. But we fixed it now.)
Finally showing the correct player ship during the ending sequence, including weapon mounts!
Tried again to fix the ship counter bug. Did I finally, finally fix it all the way for good? Maybe!

Miscellaneous Polish

Ultrawide display support has been upgraded to include a wider movement space for the player ship to go to the far left/right sides of the screen as well as an even distribution of enemy spawn positions to dynamically fill this wider space.
Did another polish pass on the event info displays on the title screen so that all text fits better.