Beat the Machine: Rebooted News

Beat the Machine – Patch 1.4

We are proud to announce our new settings menu. Change brightness, gamma and now cap your framerate!

We also are providing Quality of Life changes to Armada and Doomblades along with deploying a bugfix to both, where some players had no instances of them on screen.

Armada – Now blocks enemies along with projectiles
Doom Blades – Doom Blades spin slightly faster, and their hitbox has also been increased slightly.

Skills:

Triple Barrage has been the skill most used in the game. We expect it to be picked over its counterpart but Triple Barrage provides too much agency in the later levels with clearing out enemies. We decided to not nerf the side chains for Triple Barrage because the damage they deal is already quite low. We instead decided to nerf the main row of bullets when you take a point in triple barrage. This means that enemies that are farther away in later levels might need that extra shot to kill them, and one crit against that enemy is no longer an instant kill.

Triple Barrage - Unlocking this skill now reduces your main bullet damage by 10%, regardless if the shot is a critical hit.

Bugfixes:
- Level 13 now correctly displays the loading screen when you beat the level.
- Levels 1/7 have brand new UI integrated explaining the Objective Counter / Generator objective more clearly.
- Audio Cleanup.

Clarity:
- Some players were having trouble loading into levels due to the zoom in camera. We increased the speed on it, and allowed it to match frames better. Overall it should feel better in game if your computer has low specifications.

That’s the major stuff in Patch 1.4! Please enjoy!

From here on out expect small patches every so often.

Beat the Machine – Patch 1.3

Now that everything has calmed down, we are releasing our first balance patch of Beat the Machine’s lifetime. We’re as excited as you are, and we wanted to buff some of our underused skills and nerf some of the strong skills we keep seeing. Without further ado, let’s get started.

Levels:

Level 2 should now be around 3% easier.
Level 5 should now be around 2% harder.
Level 7 should now be around 4% easier.

Stats:
Overall, our stats feel well rounded. But Rate of Fire is way too strong not only in stats but skills, stacking rate of fire has become the op meta and causes you to burst down the strongest of units. Armor feels underwhelming and overall feels the weakest, it does not really have a way of portraying how much you have in total and could be a cause of its usage being a bit lower than we'd like.
Armor: Armor per point increased from 6 to 7. Max up from 60 to 70
Rate of Fire: Rate of fire per point decreased from 4% to 3%. Max down from 40% to 30%

Skills:

Staying true to our above statement. Our skills that grant rate of fire feel a bit too strong. We also are changing Time Capsule and Charge Gate to no longer block projectiles, but we have buffed them to keep them power neutral. Fervor of Battle is getting a rework as the skill inherently wanted the player to keep a group of enemies around them alive to gain armor. Now gain armor per kill.




Vitality:

Agility Attacks: Tooltip fix, now correctly notes the cooldown is 15 seconds not 12 seconds.
Fervor of Battle Rework: Killing an enemy grants 0.2 armor stacking up to 200 times for a max of 40 armor.

Utility:

Wave Dash Buff: Cooldown decreased from 12 seconds to 10 seconds
Time Capsule Net Neutral: No longer stop projectiles, damage increased from 15 per second to 18 per second. Cooldown increased from 35 seconds to 45 seconds, radius increased from 160 to 225.

Coherence Nerf: Cooldown increased from 5 seconds to 6 seconds.
Overclock Nerf: Rate of fire per stack reduced from 3% to 2.5%. Max Rate of Fire decreased from 30% to 25%.

Rapid Fury Nerf: Rate of fire granted decreased from 40% to 35%

Break the Machine Buff:
Wave Dash cooldown lowered from 8 to 7.
Time Capsule damage up from 25 per second to 30 per second.

Power:

Afterburner: Buff: Damage increased from 6(+28% Damage) to 8(+28% Damage)
Reactor Retaliation: Buff: Damage increased from 10 (+10% Damage) to 15 (+12% Damage)

Systems Changes:

Bugfix: Fixed a bug where audio would sometimes repeat itself if you stood still for too long.
Bugfix: Fixed a bug where clearing skills on an old save would delete your current skill points.
Bugfix: Fixed a bug where saves would not delete on save.

Level Changes:

Levels 7/8/14/22

Fixed a bug where sometimes the end portal would not spawn.

Level 3/5/6/7/11

Fixed a bug where sometimes bullets would randomly disappear in certain areas.


Skills Changes:

Afterburner:
-Afterburner now more accurately represents its range.

Lashing Blitz:
Lashing Blitz was too hard to hit a group of enemies with, now its a bit bigger allowing you to hit a bigger group of enemies.
-Range increased from 80 from 100.

Reactor Retaliation:
Reactor Retaliation felt too weak of a last skill in the power tree, we gave it a small buff to make a it feel a little better.
New Feature: Now scales with 15% of your armor.

Survival Changes:

Survival has been updated to feel a bit smoother. Enemies spawn more regularly, and skills feel a bit more fluid with controller settings.

Survival skills: All skills no longer cause a bug where having too many skills prevents you from buying another one.

UPDATE: Deleting skills from a previous save file, causes you to lose all skill points. Please refrain from resetting points before completing your next level.

After launching our first title, Beat the Machine, we realized huge bugs that needed to be addressed as fast as possible. First we noticed some huge system bugs that were causing player experiences to be far below then intended.

System Changes:

Bugfix: Fixed a bug where players were unable to quit the game from the main menu.
Bugfix: Fixed a bug where hitting the back button on controller would fail to work from the skill tree menu.
Bugfix: Options menu removed from game. It will added back at a later time. We want to really polish up our options menu and allow for a few more changes.

Dialogue Changes:
Our dialogue left a lot to be desired and we fixed a few issues.
Bugfix: Audio/Dialogue boxes no longer trigger over one another, causing multiple dialogue lines to play at the same time.

Skill Tree UI:
We saw frustration, blood, sweat and tears remaining in the garage of the hub world. When you noticed that your skills are permanent and that in order to play forward it caused you to have to A) play a new save or B) Grind your way to victory. Beat the Machine is about skill / play expression and we want the player to be able to "Play their own Way". In the Skill Tree UI we added our best friend button. "The Clear ALL skills button"

- The skill tree has a clear all skills button, allowing the player to remove all current skills and regain all of the points they earned, allowing them to switch their options at any point.

CLARITY:
After completing a level, a new UI appears telling you, you have points to spend in the garage. Sorry everyone!

Skill Changes:

Vitality:
Healing Strikes was a great skill but needed clarity.
- Healing Strikes
-New Feature: Healing Strikes is now shown on the ability bar to show which attack your on!

Power Surge was clearly the worst of all the active skills offered in the tree. The damage, and shielding feel powerful, but the area of effect just felt too small to effect nearby enemies, putting players to close to enemies and creating a huge risk for not a big output of damage. Power surge should involve less risk but should offer a moderate / good reward.
- Power Surge
-Radius Increased from 100 to 240.


Utility:
Charge Gate felt like a strong spell, as long as you could maneuver within its constrains. However; Charge gate still offered two major issues to players upon selecting this skill. First, charge gate's radius is way too small offering no way for the player to kite inside of it. Second, charge gate needs clarity of when its going to activate.
- Charge Gate
-Radius Increased from 100 to 250.
-New Feature: Charge Gate's Cooldown is now shown on the ability bar.
-Added: Charge Gate's movement bonus now lingers for 1 second after leaving the area.

Time Capsule is a versatile skill, that should be used to bait enemies into corners and narrow pathways.
Time Capsule is getting a small update to ensure that's the way to use it.
- Time Capsule
-Time Capsule: Radius increased from 150 to 160.
-Bug-fix: Time Capsule no longer appears invisible after its first use.

Coherence was one of the strongest skills out of the gate. But it wasn't due to its shielding power or even its cooldown, it was how it reacted with the health bar. Shielding no longer is effected by armor on the player, and losing shield that would reduce health if it overlapped no longer gets ignored.
- Coherence:
-Mechanics Change: Shield gained from Coherence is no longer reduced by armor.
-Bug-fix: If you take damage that would exceed your shield value, you no longer ignore the
remaining damage, and take the remaining damage ignored as health lost.


Power:
Overall the power tree feels awesome to play with! We want to put some clarity and change into Trip Mine however.
Trip Mine is an awesome skill but its a bit confusing in the tool-tip.
- Trip Mine:
-Tool-tip updated: No longer states that Trip Mine's dissipate after 2.5 seconds.
-Tool-tip correctly states you can have 5 active trip mine's on the map.
-New Feature: Trip Mine's damage toward the player is now reduced by armor built.


Level Changes:

Level 2:
A painstakingly hard level, that teaches the player, that some things need to be navigated slowly and methodically. However; the player shouldn't get punished for getting too close to the edge. They need to be punished upon driving off of the edge.
-Level 2
-Falloff positions moved back slightly, and no longer overlap the edge.

Level 7:
This level is just down right brutal.
-Level 7:
-Level difficulty decreased by 2.5%, Generators now die regardless of the order you take them
out. Previously, the right generator required at least one other to be destroyed.

Level 15:
Quality of Life:
-Level 15:
-Data wall projectiles are a bit more green. Allowing the player to see them a bit easier. Sorry
deuteranopia players!


Survival:
-Wave Dash
-Wave Dash no longer grants invulnerability for 1000 seconds. Now properly grants 1 second of
invulnerability.

Hello Anti-virus agents,

We have been informed of some current major/minor bugs across the game, and are currently addressing these issues. We will have a patch out later today.

Thank you all for your patience, and keep protecting Sector VIII!

-Syncopia