Power of Ten News

It's finally here! After a little over three years my wee game is fully released!

Full version is going out a bit early to folks who've already purchased it but it'll go on sale at 9 am PST tomorrow (the 11th) so hold out till then if you want a good deal.

Here's what's been changed or added in the 1.0 update:

[h2]Intro Story[/h2]
I am really excited for you all to experience this. To be honest when I started this whole project I didn't have a story in mind at all but I'm proud I was able to craft something that feels this grounded and solid. The introduction is a bit of a different approach to story telling than typical cinematic openings so I hope you find it enjoyable and immersive.

[h2]The Tenth Playable Ship[/h2]
I'm calling this the 4-1 ship and it may be my favorite design. It's incredibly versatile but still tricky to get full value out of so I'm very excited to see how you all use it. You'll be able to find this ship in the last region of the game and each other ship will "shift" down a region from their current unlock area.

[h2]Game Mechanic Updates[/h2]
[h3]Progression upgrades[/h3]
I'm pretty happy with how the Surge system brings a lot of optional difficulty to the game but I'm still a bit disappointed about the completion rate of the base game. So I'm adding some statistical progression to the base game. Just a wee bit! As you play and level your progression score you'll unlock various power upgrades to all ships. There's a handful of these and they are relatively minor each but add up to a significant power jump if you obtain them all. They are all obtained relatively early on in the progression levels and I've significantly reduced how much each level takes to progress with these additional levels. My hope is this helps players who are struggling grind through a bit more and are eventually able to complete the game without too much tampering with the balance of Surge levels.

[h3]Upgrade Rerolls[/h3]
Not hitting a few key upgrades can really make a run flounder. I want to give players a bit more agency over this so I've added an option to reroll upgrades (if you have the credits for it!). This should make it much easier to nab that favorite upgrade that just makes your build sing.

[h3]Gear Container Rerolls[/h3]
It felt like "optimal" play to only reroll the lowest tier containers, because there's a chance to downgrade if they are higher. This feels a bit limiting as far as choices go. It already costs a fair amount to reroll containers so having a double penalty just feels really bad. So I got rid of it! Rerolling will either do nothing or upgrade and occasionally it will double upgrade! The upgrade that removed the downgrade make it have better odds at upgrading. Hopefully this will be more fun all around and give a lot more strategic choices to gear containers.

[h2]New Content[/h2]
- 4 new upgrades + 1 new starter upgrade
- 4 new weapons
- New system augment.
- 2 more surge levels (10 total now)
- 1 new consumable item
- Three new localisations: Turkish, Hungarian and Polish

[h2]Quality of Life Improvements[/h2]
- Added a few tip screens for some less intuitive mechanics.
- Loadout will display on pause during a run.

- Interface/display size toggling without exiting the game
- Cloud saves enabled cross browser.
- Fire asteroids are outlined in red making them much easier to see and avoid.
- Added another larger level to UI scaling for those of you with tiny pixels ;).
- System select will show how augments effect civilian counts.

[h2]Balance changes[/h2]
- Systems with "Hazard Detected" have significantly less hazards that spawn.
- Lots of small tweaks to various weapons to make some less powerful weapons stronger.
- Starformer's ability has been tweaked slightly. Less missiles will fire but it'll slash swords at frequent intervals around it.
- Shield breaker ships will spawn more consistently in surge level 3. You should have one spawn roughly every 4 waves rather than a completely random chance for every wave.

A few changes focused on adding some more functionality to a few under powered upgrades.
- Long range scanner: added ability to see enemy traps in the system
- Fire/acid immunity upgrades: both will increase the amount of damage fire or acid do while making your ship immune to their respective element.
- Several starter upgrades increased in power level (I want these to still be "build around" upgrades but they were starting to be a little weak in comparison to others).
- Upgrades that drop pickups will spit them further if you are going faster so you don't have to back track to pick them up.

In later regions it's pretty easy to stagnate with resources if you get an unlucky roll on the ratio of uninhabited to inhabited. These changes should make that scenario far less likely as it'll be easier to find sources.
- Uninhabited planets have a higher floor of possible asteroids that circle them and will gain more asteroids on average as you move through regions.
- Asteroid resource rewards will increase slightly as you move through the regions.

[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]
- Fixed an issue where having two controller/devices hooked up would cause the controls to not function.
- Fixed an issue where system civilian count wouldn't display properly on system select.

Yup the game has a full release date! I'm excited to announce that the game will come out in it's "full"(though likely not final) release on January 11th, 2022!

Here's a sneak peak at what's going to be in the final update going into the full release:

• Intro Story - I am really excited for you all to experience this. I won't give away too much at this time but here's a one of the "sections" below
  
• The tenth playable ship
  
• Progression upgrades - Just a wee bit! As you play and level your progression score you'll unlock various power upgrades to all ships.
  
• Upgrade Rerolls
  
• Changes to Upgrade Rerolls - Changing up the strategy around rerolling containers as they will no longer downgrade.
  
• New Content- New surge levels (10 total now), weapons, upgrades, consumable items.
  
• Lots of quality of life improvements.
  
• Lots of balance changes.
  
• As many bug fixes that I can fit in.
  

Want to try it now? It's on the beta branch! I'll be pushing in-development versions to the "full-version" branch on Steam (Windows only atm). Switch over to try it out.

Hey folks, I wanted to share an update with you on the progress of the 1.0 update.

[h2]Intro Story[/h2]
I'm putting a lot of work into this and I'm really hoping it's a good way to ground players into the game world as much as possible. It's taking a lot longer than I anticipated, mostly because it's a lot of bespoke art pieces. Rest assured they are coming along. Here's a few individual "scenes" to spark your interest:









[h2]New Ship![/h2]
There will be a 10th ship in the 1.0 update! This is a bit of a 4 in 1 ship. Highly versatile and contains a lot of nuance that I hope will make for interesting choices. I won't spoil too much about it but I'm excited to get it out to you all.

[h2]Loadout Display[/h2]
I wanted to add this feature for so long but always had bigger fish to fry. I'm really excited to announce that you'll be able to view your full loadout when you pause anytime in game. This gives you access to a lot of details about ship ability, weapons and upgrades that you can use to make decisions throughout your runs. Here's how it'll look:


[h2]Steam Deck Compatibility[/h2]
I recently got a Deck and have good news: the game runs very well there! I'm fairly confident it's at least "Playable" state if not "Verified" according to Steam. The problem is Steam won't review it until it's my time in line which may be a while since it seems like they tend to be verifying popular games rapidly. So I can't give an ETA on when that will happen, it's up to the powers that be at Valve.

[h2]Timeline[/h2]
While I haven't set a firm date I'm pretty confident that I'll be shipping the 1.0 version before the end of the year. I'll likely be wrapping up a bunch of development over the next month and setting a release date during that time. Be on the lookout in the coming weeks for the date announcement!

Hey folks, I've got a medium sized update for you! I've got a lot of other irons in the fire right now, working on story in the background, some other small features that may or may not flesh out entirely and I'm working a bit on a side project which I hope to share with you all soonish.

[h2]Balance & Pacing[/h2]
I've made quite a few tweaks to adjust the difficulty curve dramatically. Basically I want the later zones to feel significantly less like slog than they do now. I've significantly pulled back on resource costs in later zones to power up shield generators and armor scaling of enemies. As I've stated before I think the base difficulty is still too hard and few people are actually completing it so I'm taking some fairly radical steps to fix this. I want people to feel truly challenged in Surge levels so I've relocated some of the more difficult challenges to those levels. Here's a list of what's changing

• Shieldbreakers will not spawn in base levels and have been moved to Surge level 4. These caused some pretty hopeless feeling whiplash if you are caught unaware. Having to repower a single shield generator felt like a death sentence most of the time.
  
• Removed the surge level effect of random Item Containers tiers. This made the game pretty unfun pretty quickly in the surge levels. I decided to replace this with Shieldbreakers as it's still a challenge you can overcome and play around vs just having to have more resources than ever.
  
• Last two regions have had their resource requirements for shield generators severely scaled back.
  
• Most enemies have had their health scaling reduced drastically.
  
• System augment "Hazards" have been scaled back a bit.
  

[h2]Control Schemes[/h2]
I've received lots of feedback about folks being disappointed this isn't a twin stick shooter. I've listened and understand the sentiment, it's familiar and easy to pick up and play. I do believe the gameplay achieved with P10's current control scheme adds something unique to the game and have pushed back some against twin stick shooter controls. Additionally I always felt it would blow out the balance of the game, that the game with twin stick would be so ridiculously easy I'd have to rebalance a lot of the game. I've been experimenting with twin stick for a bit now and I'm happy to say some of those things were a bit unfounded.

Today the game can be played both the standard way it worked before or with Twin Stick controls as you may be used to from other top down games. When you first start game you'll be asked which you prefer, with a note from myself about why I believe the Standard experience is special. I hope you all are able to enjoy the game whichever way is most comfortable.

Hope you enjoy these updates! More coming soon as I'm working on a lot in the background that I'm really excited to share with you.

Hey folks, P10 is in the summer sale at a deep 35% off! Get in there and start saving the universe!