Greetings! Since the previous release this year, after a lot of playtesting and mulling over feedback I got about Second Legacy, I've worked on a few quality of life improvements and stuff that will allow customizing the gameplay moving forward. So this version I'm releasing today contains a couple new features, and as usual various fixes. I'll elaborate a bit on the new features and an important change below.

New ark modding mechanic

From now on, after selecting your ark, you can configure it with mods that are installed into one of the 4 available mod slots. Each mod is responsible for implementing one of the already established gameplay mechanics, such as firepower increase when collecting power-ups, shield-bombs storage, or even the EX mode. The goal here is to allow players customizing the way they want to play the game to a certain extent. More mods could be discovered in-game later on, and I'm thinking about allowing players changing gear between stages as well.

Of course, I'll have to add some sort of equipment tracking to the score ranking system. So that one can check which gear was used to achieve a given score.

Auto-targeting cannons for the green ark

At long last, the 2nd ark, the green one gets different to the 1st one (red). It now features auto-aim. Which means that bullets will be fired towards enemies, but not beyond a maximum shooting angle. Note that it does not mean that bullets are homing on enemies either. Once fired, they still go on a straight trajectory. To compensate for the advantage that this gives the player, I weakened a bit the power of the bullets themselves.

Checkpoint selection

This is still quite incomplete, but you should now be able to select the checkpoint you want to redeploy from on bailout. That way if you need to strengthen your ark or gather bombs before taking on a boss, it should be possible, provided that proper level design allows it.

Training simulator removal

As of late, I often thought that letting Eileen (the training simulator operator character) explain how to play with dialog lines was kind of awkward and that directly reading the full text would be faster. Additionally, after adding the new ark mod system, it was difficult to ensure that the content of each training simulator trial would always remain on point. So I replaced this whole mode with an in-game manual instead. This manual only contains information that was covered by the training simulator before for now, but later I can add more stuff in it (tips about equipment, and information about enemies, etc...). This manual will likely turn into a full fledged codex sometime.

Note that if you'd rather read something lore-free, the Readme.md file that accompanies the game executable is still there.

EX forecast overhaul

On top of merging both players' EX forecast gauges into a single one located at the top center of the game viewport, I've rewritten the whole energy loop so that it feels more like an economy of some sort. Shooting enemies with normal fire still stacks up energy, but now shooting them with focused fire takes energy back from the stacked up amount (that was not the case before). Big enemies like bosses will also release energy on simple hits, and not only on destruction, to allow players filling their ark tanks gradually during a long confrontation. If this approach is viable, balancing it correctly will still take some time.

Anyway because of the redesign of this system, I think achieving high scores will be more difficult than before as well.

RELEASE NOTES - 0.48.0a

New features

• New mod system that allows customizing player ark capabilities before starting the game
• Made the griffin (green) ark auto-aim at enemies in normal firing mode
• Now player bullets do a configurable amount of damage, per bullet type, to compensate for the huge advantage of using auto-aim
• Added a new bailout option allowing already discovered checkpoints to be used for redeployment, but for now retaining a single stage path only
• Added ark status and equipment display on the pause screen
• Replaced training simulator with a in-game manual

General Changes

• Merged EX forecast of both players into a single shared value, and redesigned the relevant parts of the UI accordingly
• EX forecast design overhaul: now it is possible to stack and harvest energy from bosses when damaging them, and the amount of energy obtained when harvesting it is yielded from the amount of stacked energy, taking into account distance toward the enemy as well as bullets being grazed at the same time
• Removed shieldbomb mode gameplay option as it is now implemented as an ark mod
• Now player ark types have different EX tank capacities

Logic fixes

• Fixed a crash occurring when closing the game window during gameplay or pause
• Fixed an overlooked bug that caused EX-mode and EX beam to be interrupted when exiting the pause
• Fixed a lingering bug causing combo hits to drop before the boss total destruction and bounty accounting
• Fixed player shieldbomb stock to be properly reset on bailout or destruction, instead of when getting back control after redeployment
• Fixed light exposure reset when quitting gameplay

Presentation changes & fixes

• Minor graphics touch-ups

Thanks a lot for your interest in Second Legacy. See you next update!