Hello, Raid Leaders! Time for the first update!

As it happens, the game was launched just in time for the Feedback Quest jam. Last two weeks were very insightful. It's quite easy to get caught up in development and ignore some of the obvious issues the game has - just because it is familiar to you and you have workarounds for all its issues.

And guess what? Actual players do not have those workarounds! Reading people's feedback and especially seeing people play on the stream was quite sobering. It is also curious to read about the game being kinda fun and promising, while most of the players actually ignored encounter rewards and never got to use elemental abilities - which are, from what I expected, the most fun thing in all of this. It is, indeed, understandable - I did a poor job explaining some of the things the game has to offer, and players got bored with the game before figuring those out. The balance was also built around 30+ minute raids, and most players were finished with the game after first 15 minutes because first 2-3 encouters were too easy.

Well, you live and you learn, even after 10 years of commercial gamedev experience!

There was no update last week, since I really got caught up in some real-life things. I mentioned before that I am moving to another contry to protect my unemployment and ability to work on this game as much as possible. This remains the case. However, I was still able to roll out this little patch to address the most critical issues. Here's what's new!

New Look

• The game now has its own title art, thanks to awesome Derek Souza (@derekpxart on Twitter)
• Those square little weirdos are now actual slimes with their own sprites and wobbly animation!
• All sprites now turn left/right when they move, and crabs shake the pincers while walking! Small things, but it does make the picture a lot more lively
• Existing levels were reworked and new ones were added. They do have the same layout, but the environment is slightly different - two levels for the "Shore" area and two underwater levels for "Shallows"
• Lighting was tweaked on all levels and several performance issues were tackled

Settings Menu

• A lot of people asked me if I used the game to mine for crypto. I did not. But there were a lot of GPU-heavy features I did not turn off when packaging the initial build. The game is built with UE5, so it has a lot of fancy-raytracy stuff turned on by default. This is now an option, with a number of ways to improve FPS in the game
• A number of UX settings to toggle popup numbers, healthbars for crabs and enemies and auto-pause on level up

Hints & UX Improvements

• Messy controls code was refactored and is now more clean. For players it means that all existing control options work more stable, and crabs can be selected by mouse click too. There is little indication for that yet, I'll focus on this in the next update
• Rewards after encouter are easier to pick up, and there is now a prompt that reminds players to do that
• Totems now have popup text that give a little more information about what they do
• Fancy level-up notification