Okay. Big one. Lotta changes.

Start Menu

The game has a start menu now! It’s pretty :) You can start a new game with a given seed, manage settings, and manage saves. And that brings us to:

Saving / Loading

Your game can now be saved so you can keep all your precious upgrades and hard earned cash. Settings are now also persistent so you don’t have to fiddle with them every session. In addition, I implemented a system that will make it possible to automatically migrate saves from older versions of the game to newer versions.

Skill Bonuses!

Some of the most fun I’ve had playing Etherscape has been just zooming around collecting pickups as fast and precisely as I can. So I decided to add some features to incentivize that style of play. Now, when you collect a pickup, various factors can add a multiplier to the pickup’s value. The bonuses currently implemented are:

• Precision (collecting a pickup without grappling it directly)
• Speed (how fast you’re going when you collect a pickup)
• Combo (collecting multiple pickups between swings)

If you have some ideas for other bonuses I could implement, I’d love to hear about them.

Quality of Life

• Game now displays on-screen messages. Saving, gaining currency, skill bonuses, control prompts, etc.
• Added perspective to the minimap. I found myself constantly getting turned around, unable to figure out what direction I was pointed in. It was like that optical illusion where you cant tell if a cube is concave or convex. Haven’t had that problem since making this tweak.
• Added a rangefinder to the HUD. It’s nice to have a clear idea of how far away things are.
• Added an pulsating glow to the pickups. Draws the eye and makes them a lot easier to spot, especially in greenish levels.

UI Polish

I spent some time cleaning up the UI and menus, working out a few weird quirks. I even completely rebuilt the upgrades menu.

Bugfixes

• player can spam portal travel
• portal zone detection does not update correctly
• traveling through a portal while standing on the floor causes the player to get stuck on the floor
• pillar terrain not generating deterministically for any given world seed
• weird bug where the help text was causing the pause menu to be too tall

You’re Awesome!

Thank you so much for reading this and playing my game! If you have issues, questions, or suggestions, feel free to leave a comment or post on the community forum.

- zinnoa <3