Omvorm has been dormant for a little while due to the fact I accidentally deleted the original game file like some kind of IDIOT person. Nintendo requires the original in order to update it with new stuff and so I was stuck but luckily for me, they are the nicest people in the world and they sent me back the file I originally sent them. What this means then is that Omvorm is getting a few updates!
This first patch is fixing a few bugs that cropped up again and fixing some technical things in the backend. Patch 1.2 is going to tweak gameplay hugely and make some really important updates to the UI but I can talk all about that later on.
Increased frame rate to 60 FPS from the original versions 30 FPS. Some effects and settings on Nintendo Switch lead to the game being played at 30 FPS but these have now been optimised so the game runs at a silky-smooth 60FPS whether docked or in hand-held mode. The PC version has also been bumped up to 60 FPS
Upgraded to Unreal Engine 4.24 which of course brings all the improvements that come with a new version of Epic’s engine.
End game scores recalculated in multi-player mode to stop one player from getting into the lead and then simply ending the game in order to win. Now you receive 10,000 points for each life you have in play upon the end of the game. This, of course, means the surviving player receives at least 10,000 extra points which should mean they win the match as the other player has initiated the game over sequence.
Stopped text expanding beyond high score table if you input your name as something super long. This looked super rubbish and ruined everything in your life if you ever saw it. Now scores/names are confined to the boxes.
All new logo because that is, of course, the most important thing to update in the game. The old 4MB logo is out and our fancy new 4MB logo is in. Is the game FGbetter for it? Yes. Yes, it is.
Hopefully, it will not be almost a year until the next patch (it definitely won’t be a year) so Omvorm should receive a much-needed gameplay tweak over the next couple of months. What I have in mind fundamentally changes the core gameplay loop and I think massively for the better.
After twelve months of dicking around and wasting time on boring “actual life stuff”, finally I have had the time to actually get Undead Blackout to the point I would like it to be at. This means I have rushed it onto Steam in time for the Summer Sale and while it still needs a little work the main thing is that the all-new and improved version of the game has arrived.
REIMAGINED. REBOOTED.
The game has been rebuilt from the ground up, many assets have of course been carried over but large chunks of the game are brand new. For all intents and purposes it is a ‘new’ game. Much closer to the kind of thing I was vaguely imagining like a million years ago.
The game has been built using the latest version of Unreal Engine 4 (4.22.3 if you were wondering) and with this comes loads of improvements without me really having to do anything at all. The game runs smoother and faster. Alongside these built in improvements I have actually done a bit of work myself and many of the systems in the game are better optimised as are the levels themselves. Built in a much better way, they require less memory than before and shall be optimised even further in due course.
The levels themselves, while a few are set in similar environments, have been totally changed. Gone are the three fairly open areas in which you had to hunt a key and in their place are various “Blackout Zones” and paths connecting them. The Blackout Zones now form the core part of the gameplay. Areas that player finds themselves trapped in and can only escape by powering up a big old metal door. Naturally of course, these areas are teeming with zombies so you have to balance powering the door up with taking them out or running away from them.These are the only areas of the game now in total darkness, everywhere else has a bit of moonlight or a fire or something to help you.
The game is much more “arcadey” now. Zombies drop ammo, score boosts and health. You increase your multiplier by killing them and lose it once they successfully attack you. I was caught a little between trying to be a top-down Resident Evil and just a twin-stick shooter previously and it left the game worse off. Now we are purely arcade with the whole twist of it being pretty damn dark.
The zombies are a lot dumber. This might come as a shock to you but the AI in the earlier version was actually pretty decent. Zombies would wander around and react to you running past or investigate gunshots. The problem was that this was actually no fun. A lot of the time they just wandered straight past you while in the next room.
So now they are dumb. They just head straight for you. Can smell you a mile off or something. This might be less “realistic” but it is loads more fun. Provided you like shooting zombies.
The other major difference is that the melee weapons are gone. I loved the idea of having melee weapons, but again, it just wasn’t that fun. You could spend ages looking for a gun and getting annoyed that you died so the decision was made to scrap the axe and give players a pistol by default. A pistol with infinite ammo.
There are still Assault Rifles and Shotguns dotted about but you will at least be able to fend off the Undead with your trust pistol should you feel the urge. It has made the game more fun, more fast paced and actually more skill based seeing as you can one-shot kill the zombies when using the Aiming mode.
2.1 AND BEYOND
The game then is at a point I can say I don’t hate it. Absolutely I have pushed the update before it is 100% ready but I wanted to make the most of the sale so version 2.1 is not going to be far behind.
There will be a lot of quality of life updates, nice little animations added in here and there. Some of the levels also look a little barren so I will be making them much more interesting. And of course, a whole load of bugs will be getting smashed to death.
I am looking to get version 2.1 out in July at some point while 2.2, which is going to feature a funky new mode, will arrive in August.
Rescue On Fractulus was released in 1984 by LucasFilm Games, who would of course go on to become Lucasarts Entertainment. It appeared on pretty much all the popular platforms of the time such as the Atari 5200, ZX Spectrum, Apple II and the Commodore 64.
It was one of my very earliest gaming memories. It is a game which we owned on the Commodore 64 and it was picked up at some car boot sale for probably 50p or something. No doubt one of many, many games that we would have grabbed but one of the few to actually work. Or at least, one of the few that I actually had the patience to wait to see if it worked.
If that sentence is confusing to you it might be because you are not old enough to know that the Commodore 64 used cassette tapes. You would pop your game into the cassette deck and it would then load over what seemed like several hours. Usually after 10-20 minutes (longer or shorter depending on the game!) the splash screen would appear and you would be in business.
One of the games that thankfully worked was Rescue On Fractulus; it is possibly the first game that ever genuinely scared me. According to the Wikipedia page I linked earlier, it was one of the first games to really scare players. It certainly caused me to crap my pants. Not literally. I was potty trained by ten.
What was the game about then? Well, you were a spaceship pilot and were tasked with rescuing your fellow pilots who were stranded on the planet of Fractulus, hence the hugely imaginative title. You flew around in cockpit view across the barren terrain on the lookout for these downed craft. Once you spot one, you have to land and wait for the pilot to hop on board. You had to lower your shields in order to let the pilot get close to the ship, then unlock the airlock door to let him in. Simple enough right?
Nope wrong. Sometimes the pilots would actually be fucking aliens in disguise so they would run up to your ship and if you spotted they were an alien then you would turn your shields back on. If you did not spot they were an alien then they would try and smash their way into the cockpit. Worse, if you were dumb enough to let the damn aliens into your ship, they would just smash the whole place up. Why did they do this? I have no idea. There may have been an elaborate back story in there but I totally didn’t catch it. As a ten year old I just assumed that the aliens were dicks.
This then leads nicely to the scariest moment of my childhood. I am sure you can kind of guess what happens. Now at this time, I shared a room with my brother and sister and so any extended, peaceful gaming sessions were hard to come by. To get around this I had decided to wake up at like 5am and have the C64 all to myself for a few hours. Once the game had loaded, I made sure the volume was super low and preceded to whizz around Fractulus rescuing pilots and incinerating aliens. It was amazing. I was utterly lost in this world and having the best time.
Then it happened. Maybe I had gotten tired or maybe I had just gotten cocky. The hotshot pilot who thought he had tamed this cruel alien world. What an idiot. I had spotted a pilot in need of rescue and so I landed and lowered my shields. At this point, I assume I was so casual about the whole thing I didn’t even consider the possibility that my passenger-to-be was anything other than 10 pixels of human.
So when the alien leapt on the window, I froze. I panicked and didn’t turn on my shields. Ten-year-old me was seconds from virtual death. The alien burst through the screen and it was all over. My mission failed. How many lives would now be lost due to my mistake? Ten-year-old me felt the burden of their deaths. Also, he was probably super tired.
I remember sitting there in the total silence of my house at 6am and could not believe what had happened. My heart was racing and I stared at the screen in shock. It was brilliant. Up until that point, the primary emotions I had enjoyed from playing games were either amusement or frustration. For the first time a game shocked and scared me. Looking back at the screenshots of the game now, it looks just awful. But that is the power of video games, isn’t it? You can lose yourself in these worlds, even if they look terrible. The right game overrides its shoddy graphics and transports you into its world. (I say ‘shoddy graphics’ with the benefit of hindsight of course, at the time it was all quite revolutionary!)
I would love to make a game that paid homage to Fractulus but would settle for a game that at least makes a ten-year-old to very nearly pass out from shock at 6am in the morning.
Remember our little Unreal Engine Spring Jam entry that is coming to Nintendo Switch? Omvorm? Well, it is very nearly ready. But you guessed that from the title. It has taken a little under a month for me to spruce it up. New modes have been added. Tweaks have been made to the speed of the game. All in all, it is a massive improvement over what was already a fun game.
Currently, I am finishing up all the various tasks required before the game can be submitted to Nintendo. With any luck I can get that sorted this week or next, then it will be down to them to check there is nothing catastrophically wrong. I expect there will be some weird thing I need to fix so won’t guess at a release date just yet.
Working with the Switch has been great fun. I think Unreal Engine makes this process so much easier with the ability to easily switch off effects or processes that could cause a drop in FPS. Getting good performance in both handheld and docked mode was a little challenging but got there in the end. A steep learning curve certainly but being able to playtest the game on the bus is just the best.
Overall the development of this game has been markedly smoother than the previous three. No surprise really given I massively underestimated the work they needed. Galactic Defence Squadron is maybe the exception in terms of the ambition of the project. However, with that one, I got hugely stuck on some technical aspects which just wasn’t fun.
Starting with the small Game Jam project then moving into proper development has been great. I had spoken earlier this year about the desire to create small, experimental projects alongside the bigger more ambitious titles and perhaps this is the way to do it. Enter some game jams throughout the year then take those ideas and develop them further if they seem to warrant it. If not, I am sure that the experience will prove valuable in its own right.
Shifting Shapes
What then has really changed between the hastily smashed together Shape Shift and Omvorm? In truth, not a huge amount but also in another way, everything has changed. At a quick glance, you might not think too much. In actual fact, there have been a whole host of changes, many under the hood.
Changes for 1.0.0
Omvorm has been giving a huge amount of polish in preparation for release on Nintendo Switch and proper release on PC via the Itch.io store.
All new Blitz Mode. Quick challenges of 1,2 or 3 minutes to try and get as high a score as possible. The Vormwall starts at a much greater speed. Ideal for quick bursts of play.
All new Two-Player mode! Take on your opponent in Marathon Mode to see who can survive the longest and score the most points. Or battle it out in Blitz Mode, you and your opponent against the clock to get the most points.
New Power-Ups! All new PowerDown will take away points should you collect it or speed up your wall. While PowerSwap (only in 2player modes) will take points from your opponent or speed up their wall.
Power Up’s increased in size, again to make them easier to see.
Fixed an issue where power-ups could keep spawning even after the player has stopped playing. All new voiceover! Actress Lia Albers has kindly lent her voice to our in-game update robot lady. LEVEL UP!
Player now starts with one life in order to give them a bit more of a chance. Was a bit annoying otherwise?
Controls have been tweaked and fine-tuned, the shape change and player positioning are more responsive.
Multiple colour themes added to the level. The Player has the choice between red, white, blue, and pink. Blue is the best.
The Vormtunnel has been given a makeover and now looks amazing with new textures on the walls.
The lane that the Vorm appears in now lights up to make it easier for the player to navigate to the right space.
Vibration has been added when playing with a gamepad.
New Shape! The Cylinder is gone and a Diamond has replaced it. This is easier to see from a distance. This was less an issue when playing on a TV and more for multiplayer games in Switch Tabletop mode.
Removed the function where Vorms would occasionally change their colour once you got past level 10. The idea was to trick you with a Blue triangle but it was actually just really crap and annoying.
Level meshes have been replaced with BluePrint meshes to allow for easy dynamic colour changes mid-game. This results in the white lines on the wall flashing when the player speeds the Vormwall toward them.
Max Speed added to the Vormwalls. Previously they would keep increasing in speed forever, now they hit a top speed (which is really flippin’ quick) and will maintain that. They can go over this speed should you collect a PowerDown but will then revert to the max speed once you go up a level.
Wall Speed increases at an equal rate (+2.5 per level). Previously it was 1.25x the current wall speed.
Starting wall speed is now higher at 5 over the previous 2.5
The Main Menu has been totally redesigned. Scores are now in their own section while Options allows the player to change colours and delete local scores.
A tutorial section has been added to the main menu.
Pause Menu redesigned so that you can quit out to the Main Menu.
UI has been repositioned so it doesn’t go off the screen on some larger monitors or TV’s
Delay in the Try Again and Main Menu buttons appearing on the Game Over HUD to stop players accidentally restarting before seeing their score and entering their name.
That’s it for now. But there are plenty of other changes I would love to bring to the game, but it very much depends on how well it does. Should it prove moderately successful then I will look at bringing in Online Leaderboards on Nintendo Switch as well as look into the possibility of a 4-player mode. Something I think could be really cool but not sure how well it would work on a smaller screen.
That’s all in the future, right now it is about getting Omvorm over the finish line and then getting back to work on Undead Blackout. Will drop one more Omvorm update once the release date is set in stone, a date that hopefully won’t be too far away.
Our previous blog some 7 days ago was all about how we are moving into the Alpha build of Undead Blackout. The basic blocks were there but now literally everything else needed adding in. Well, the good news is that this process is almost done! Huzzah! Drinks all round.
The best thing about this phase of development is that you stop working on fun things like shooting and running and dying and instead work on… menus. Save Game systems. Game statistics. Other things that are really useful but oh so very dull to actually work on.
However, all these things are so incredibly important. If you cannot navigate the menu with a pad then Xbox are not going to be happy. If the scores don’t save properly then that is just rubbish. The difference this time is that I am working on these things now and not leaving them all until last. All the nice visual stuff and animations are coming later. The bones of the game need to be firmly in place first.
So our main menu works with a pad. There are sections for high scores per level and overall stats. All those stats and scores are updating and saving correctly. What else have I been working on over the past week?
Rock Out With Your Block Out
Originally I was planning on getting one level blocked out, then working on all the other things before moving onto any other level work. However, I totally didn’t do that at all. I got into the flow with blocking out the levels and so I managed to block out all ten. My desire was to properly design each level but given I am working in this funky new “circular design” way, I resisted.
Previously I have spent ages on the level design way too early in the whole process. I spent hours trying to get a ceiling tile material to look right when zombie AI was still not working properly. This is dumb and you should not do it.
But all ten levels are mapped out and have the relevant triggers in the relevant places. Essentially the game then is very, very nearly “done”. You could play from level one to level ten, record high scores, kills loads of zombies, and finish the game. Although nothing would happen when you finish the game as I have not designed that yet.
That has actually been an incredibly ponderous task to complete, moving around the various triggers and making sure the BluePrints are all linked up correctly so that TriggerVolume7 correctly sets BlackoutBlocker4 to move and not accidentally BlackoutBlocker5. But game development is definitely not all fun, exciting explodey things. It is a lot of tedious stuff that in the end is 100% worth it.
Looking toward a Beta future
I have to finish getting the menu working 100%. Currently, the Pause Menu doesn’t work at all with a gamepad. Once that is done there will be a thorough playtest on both PC and Xbox One.
In theory, everything should work fine. The mechanics behind each level are the same, just in different places. It is all working on the main level where I am testing so the others should also be fine. But a proper test will find out the truth of that.
If I can complete each level without too much hassle then Undead Blackout will be ready to move into Beta. This is the time when I can spend hours on ceiling tile materials. Obviously not the most useful visual feature in a top-down game but whatever.
The list of tasks I have for this portion is filled with little visual flourishes and ideas. Of course, it also has things like “Actually build the level so it isn’t a crapload of white blocks”. An important task I am sure you can agree. However, I do see the appeal of games that go for a very clean, sterile environment as part of their visual style. Maybe I can do that next time.
Remember that UE4 Spring Jam game that I bashed together in like 3 days? We didn’t win or anything but that is fine, I am not sad. Honestly. Shape Shift is a great little game and with a bit of extra polish, it could be a brilliant game. And that is exactly what it is going to get. First of all, it is not called Shape Shift any more. It is now called…Omvorm!
Omvorm is going to get the aforementioned spit and polish but it will also get some tasty new features. First up we have Blitz Mode which will simply be a quicker version of the regular game allowing for shorter play sessions. Secondly, I will incorporate some form of competitive two-player mode. Still figuring out exactly how to structure this one so stay tuned for more details.
The game will be updated on the Itch.io page (where it shall remain free until the update rolls out) but most excitingly of all – OMVORM IS COMING TO NINTENDO SWITCH! Cannot express how excited I am to be releasing a game on a Nintendo console.
When is all this happening then? Well unless there is some terrible unforeseen problem, the game should be available in its new form this summer. The vast majority of the work was done during the game jam so I am hoping that the additional development won’t be too painful.
On a side note, Undead Blackout is still coming and I intend to split my work between the two projects over the next month or so. Exciting times ahead!
We announced the other week that Undead Blackout was getting a massive overhaul so I should probably let you know how that is going, right? Doesn’t really matter what you say at this point as that is what I am going to do.
At the moment we are in the Alpha stage of development and looking to get all of the main mechanics up to a reasonable level. At this stage I am only looking to flesh out one level then once everything functions properly within that one level, I can move onto the other nine. Yes, nine levels! I am increasing the level count by four as I am just so generous like that.
Things like controls and zombies and shooting are all back and working at a decent level so I won’t spend too long talking about those. What new stuff then has been added or where have we been experimenting?
One thing I was very keen to add to this version was some other way to damage the zombies, the cliched exploding red barrels seemed like an easy win on that front and so I have implemented a very rough early version of this. It is simply a BluePrint actor with a Health value which decreases as you shoot it, once it hits zero BOOM. Radial Damage is applied to everyone who is nearby (including the player). This will kill zombies who are close enough and send them flying across the screen, it’s a bit over the top but I like it.
I have also changed the way that ammo and health pick-ups work. Instead of being dotted around the level in random places, they are now dropped by zombies entirely at random. Ammo appears more often than Health and so far it is working really nicely, cannot see any need to tweak it. The rationale behind this is that I want players to have more ammo and be encouraged to take on the zombies, it was a bit too easy to just evade them and finish the levels in the previous version.
Another decision which kind of feeds into this is that I have ditched the melee weapons, you have a pistol by default which has infinite ammo, but needs reloading. The pistol is relatively weak and won’t do too much good against a load of zombies but is more than enough to pick off a few. Really you need the bigger weapons to make any significant headway. Again, this is a change that has increased the ‘fun factor’ of the game quite considerably.
The previous Undead Blackout had a targeting reticule on the screen and this was how you aimed at the zombies. I have ditched that for this version, instead of relying on a laser sight for all of the weapons. This works much better and thanks to the way I have set it up, it actually works like a proper laser, extending out as far as it can before hitting an object. This also changes colour when the player goes into the ‘Aimed” mode (in which you get one-shot kills but cannot move very quickly).
Perhaps the absolute coolest thing (personally speaking) that I have done involves the two-player mode. I am ditching the Versus and Survival modes for this and concentrating just on the co-op mode. Way, way back in the history of development on this I wanted the game to have a dynamic split-screen feature, if the players were close together they would share a screen if they were far apart then it would split the screen. However, the only way to do this is through C++, and at the time, I was totally crap at C++.
Today, however, I am only slightly crap at C++. This means that I have managed to add (thanks to a very good tutorial which can be found here) a dynamic split-screen feature.
The scoring system has been revamped, given this has a more arcade slant than before. You now get a multiplier that goes up the more zombies you kill and remain free from damage. Soon as you take a hit it revers back down to 1 and you start over. I am sure you don’t need me to explain to you how a multiplier works but I have done it now so whatever.
Running out of things to say but I am sure there is still loads of other stuff I have done and not mentioned here yet. The most important thing I guess is that the game is very nearly at a point where the main mechanics are in place and working perfectly. If you die, everything respawns and resets. You can navigate from the menu to the test level. You can pick your character. You can shoot, reload, and change your weapon. It is all coming together nicely.
Looking forward now the most important thing is to put together one actual level and make sure that all the elements that are fun in my crappy little test arena also work well on a proper level. This will also give me a chance to test the all-new ‘Blackout’ mechanic which will finally make the title of the game actually relevant. More on that one next time when I can actually show it off.
In the meantime please enjoy this incredibly rubbish video of me just testing a few bits of a build from a little while ago. It might not look like it yet, but the game is massively, massively improving from what it currently is on Steam. Not sure on timelines yet but things are progressing quicker than I anticipated so I am hoping to get this done before the Autumn game tsunami.
It is safe to say that Undead Blackout has not been a huge success and this should come as no surprise to anyone at all, least of all me. When the game first released on February 3rd, 2017, I was exhausted and the game was an unfinished mess. It sold a few copies but not enough for the gold-plated Lamborghini I crave and I had to settle for a gold-plated Vauxhall Corsa.
The game was then given a massive update that landed just before Christmas and while this improved and fixed so many elements, it still hasn’t reached a level where I am happy enough to let it go. Crucially the game is slated to release on Xbox One through the ID@Xbox program but it just does not work on Xbox One. Not ideal really.
Part of me wants to just let it go and move on, another part of me wants to go back to the drawing board (for like the tenth time) and get it right. So guess which part has won this internal battle? That’s right, Undead Blackout has gone back to the now battered drawing board for one final time.
Over the past month or so I have been putting together an all-new version of the game which is currently sitting in a pre-alpha stage, ready to move into alpha. That is to say, the mechanics are all present but there is only one crappy level and the whole thing looks ugly as sin. Crucially it is working absolutely perfectly on the Xbox One dev kit.
Every element of the game is going to be improved upon but perhaps where the biggest change will be seen is in the design of the levels. The existing levels were quite open in many instances and this led to a lot of wandering around looking for keys and ammo and often completely failing to find either. Also given the zombies had their own AI-powered wandering you could often fail to run into them altogether.
The new levels will be a lot more focused. I am not completely ditching the open aspects in favour of some crappy top-down corridor shooter, instead, the levels will adopt a more even flow, taking the player through some narrower sections before opening out into a larger area and so on. The current plan is for 10 new levels, many of which will be based on existing level themes while a couple will be all new areas.
The gameplay is heading in a much more arcadey direction, the slight “top-down Resident Evil” vibe is very much gone and this is much more toward the Smash TV x Left4Dead end of the spectrum. Even in the exceptionally basic test arena I currently have working, the game is arguably already more fun due to the increase in action.
Many other parts of the game will be thoroughly polished and improved upon and I won’t bother listing them here as that is just boring but shall detail them as we go through this rebuild process. I am hoping for weekly dev blogs and lots of updates on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
One final super important point (especially if you are thinking about buying the game), I fully expect that once the game has been massively improved and the amount of content has increased that I will push the price up from $3.99 to $4.99. Not a huge increase of course but still, if you want to save yourself a small amount of money then grab the game now.
Galactic Defence Squadron was smashed together in just two weeks back in October 2016. It is a great little arcade space shooter featuring some truly excellent music and an endless supply of enemies to destroy. Since then it has sat on the App Store and Google Play in its unoptimised and very rough condition – UNTIL NOW! Over the course of a week or two, I have upgraded the game to Unreal Engine 4.18 and carried out a number of other tweaks to help the game run better. All of these tweaks can be found below in a helpful bullet list format. This also marks the debut of GDS on PC via the Itch.io and Game Jolt stores and it is available for just $1. Not sure what that is in £, like 70p? In any case, it is significantly less than a cup of coffee so there is no reason not too.
Galactic Defence Squadron will probably not receive many other updates outside of bug fixes. It was a small experimental game (expect more of these!) and one which I am quite proud of, it is fun and challenging. So please go and pick it up on either mobile or PC or both if you are feeling very generous.
Update Notes Upgraded to Unreal Engine 4.18
The game was originally built in Unreal Engine 4.14 (I think) so this is a pretty decent update on that front. Unreal Engine has received numerous updates since GDS initial release and plenty of these help the game to run better on both mobile and PC.
Added full Controller and Mouse support
Seeing as the game is now available on Itch.io it seemed like a good idea to add in full controller support. This was incredibly easy to do as it was basically already in there, while testing the game in the UE4 editor I used a controller so it was simply a case of properly assigning buttons. The mouse was similarly easy to add in to the menu sections.
Replaced materials with smaller versions
The models in the game originally used the very fancy but very, very large Automotive Materials that Epic gave away on the UE4 Marketplace. Why on earth past me thought using these on a tiny mobile game would be a good idea is anyones guess. They have now all been replaced with incredibly simple and small materials which has improved the speed of the game immeasurably.
Updated Asteroid models
The asteroids in the game have had new 3D models added with a degree of randomness in their spawning so there is the illusion of a wide variety of asteroid types. There are in fact three types. These too are smaller in terms of file size means further gains in optimisation for the game.
Designed all new ships
Perhaps most excitingly from a personal perspective I have given my Blender skills a bit of an upgrade and created new ships for the player and enemy units. They are certainly not going to be winning any design awards but are a definite improvement over the previous efforts. Most pleasingly they now all have proper UV maps meaning they are lit in a more realistic way.
Added an ‘overheating’ mechanic to the player weapon
In an effort to add some kind of tactical element to the game, the main weapon will now overheat if the fire button is held down too long. It takes a while to do this so you should be able to manage it fairly simply without actually overheating. Should this happen though the gun is unusable for 2-3 seconds. A very simple mechanic to add and one which I have found increased my enjoyment of the game.
