v0.7.5 - You think you've seen explosions?
Over 100 fixes and improvements since 0.7.4!
The most drastic change is probably the new real time explosion engine, replacing the crude pixel art explosions with a level wide particle + "fire filter" engine. This brings life to the explosions, and allows them to blend and interact in a way that works much better with the massive chain reactions as bases are destroyed.
Overall, this release focuses mainly on presentation, effects, and critical bug fixes. Content and game logic has been left mostly untouched, due to the decision to rewrite the game logic core of the engine for the 0.8.x branch, in preparation for the Steam launch. The 0.8.0 release will include a reinterpretation of Region 1 (ten levels) from the original game, 0.8.x releases will be fixes and updates, 0.9.x will cover Region 2, and so on. It is likely that new game modes and similar features will be added along the way.
- Particle based pixel art style explosion/fire/smoke engine
- Bigger playfield view
- New and updated sound effects
- Weapon status icons on the dashboard
- Updated health/shield and weapon charge bar design
- Configurable keyboard controls
- Added a third fire button, eliminating the quirky context sensitive fire control
- Improved Hard and Insane skill levels; even faster, and without the boring grind to destroy bases
- Proper mouse support in the menus
- Improved replay progress bar
- Added a few demos, which are played at random behind the title screen rotation
- Fixed various user interface glitches and issues
- Fixed game logic determinism issues that would occasionally break replays and rewind/retry
- Fixed some crashes and math errors in odd corner cases
- Improved error handling when failing to load themes
- Fixed various log output issues, and eliminated some audio engine log noise