Greetings, everybody; this is Kaiden speaking. Per our weekly blog schedule, here's the scoop on what's new. We've got some neat insights to share this week, I hope you're ready!

Added Features

New: Audio Manager

We've started to implement an object that internally hosts all the sounds in the game, separating them by music and sound effects. It won't take terribly long to fully implement, but the final step to "complete" it is to add volume sliders, so that you may change the volume of the music/SFX as needed.

Along with that, this manager seeks to address a problem the beta had. Because enemies fire so quickly, the noise clutters up the sound space and can make the game unpleasant on the ears. We're working on new sound effects to replace the ones we have now, but we will also be looking into a way to optimize this jumble of gunshot sounds.

Major Change: Game Balance

For some time, Tyro and I have discussed balancing the player and enemy's damage. As it stands right now, the enemies are far too spongy, which made the game feel unresponsive. We wanted to place full emphasis on the game's speed as the ultimate goal, rather than combat. As it stands, some testers were confused as to how to react with the enemies. We've discussed plenty of solutions together, but with this new build we're working on, we are very satisfied with how the game plays now. 

To sum up the changes:

• All health -- both player and enemy HP -- has been normalized to 150 (this makes it easier for us to calculate damage output).
• The player's weapons have been significantly buffed. Enemies now take far fewer shots to kill.
• The enemy's weapons have also been slightly buffed. 
• The player's health regeneration -- caused when you are not taking damage -- has been greatly reduced. 
• Enemy hurtboxes have been greatly increased in size.
• The threshold for ramming an enemy has been tightened, requiring a higher speed to activate the ram. 
• Ramming an enemy (hopefully!) should no longer take away your momentum.
• The damage from ramming an enemy has been greatly increased.

These changes were made to allow GyroGun's lightning fast movement, and the usage of weapons to do so, to feel smoother than ever. In defining just what GyroGun is, I myself like to think of it as having bullet hell elements. Thus, there were some necessary changes to be made behind the scenes, because it wasn't quite living up to what it should feel like. Upon the release of the new build (we'll update when we have a release date), prepare for GyroGun to play better than ever!

Minor Change: New Visuals

The player now has a fancy trail of fire that follows as you move! On top of this, the boost pads also got a new sprite that points in the correct direction. Hooray for intuition!

What's Next?

The game is in a very stable spot from a gameplay perspective. We have most of the core essentials put in, and we're at a point where they all feel just about right. The last major gameplay component we're looking at is revamping the weapon swapping controls, as the number key swapping feels rather clunky. We have a plan to utilize the right mouse button to swap weapons so your hands are freed, but we are still looking into how to make it feel as intuitive as possible.

We're also hoping to improve the game's feedback with visual elements, such as adding proper animations, explosions when an enemy dies, enemies flashing when hit, etc... Speaking of visuals, we also want to try and get proper backgrounds into the game so it looks nice and polished.

There is a lot to be done still, but progress is coming along very smoothly. We're very excited watching this game come alive, and we hope you'll love to play the game as much as we love developing it.

-PuuPuu