The Next Step: 2.0 coming soon!
Hey everyone!
Today I want to share some of the new features and changes that will come to the 2.0 update that will come to Beat Invaders soon.
[h3]One important thing before we get to the meat and potatoes.[/h3]
There will be a beta test and if you are interested in taking part it would be best to join the Discord Server! Follow the link in the game or just click here.
[h2]Challenges before 2.0[/h2]
Talking to a lot of you I found out some problems with the state that Beat Invaders is at the moment:
Of course there are also some bugs, balance issues and general feature wishes - I will talk about those in the last section of this post.
This seems like one of the main problems - and I totally agree.
Beat Invaders was not planned as a big game where you could sink hundreds of hours - that is also reflected in the price. But I still think runs should feel individual and offer suprises.
But what makes a run different from another?
In my opinion it comes down to two things:
Opportunities and importance of decisions.
[h3]Ingame Upgrades[/h3]
At the current version, upgrades are purchased during a run by paying for them with collected tokens.
After each wave you are offered three random upgrades. Each upgrade has a base cost of 3 Tokens and the price is increased by each purchased level per upgrade.
This results in less decision making because a good player earns so many tokens that, most of the time, all three upgrade choices can be purchased. Also cheap upgrades can just be picked up due to the low price at a later point when the player earns much more Tokens in a run than in the beginning.
This design will be overhauled in 2.0.
In 2.0 each Token that is picked up will act as an experience point and fill up an experience bar towards the next level. The way the Tokens act as a currency in the Meta Upgrade Menu will not be touched, but more on that later.
When you earned a level up, you will be offered three random upgrade options (just like before) and can select one of those per level up. After selecting that upgrade, the offered options will instantly be rerolled. So you have to make a decision which of the three you are going to pick up.
Experience levels will also be earned much faster in the beginning of the game to help you get much quicker into the action than before!
Another change to the run upgrades are that there are just many new options, some of those have preconditions that must be fulfilled for them to be added to the upgrade pool. Speaking of the upgrade pool - Upgrades now also have a rarity attached to them with a higher or lower chance for them to be offered as one of the three upgrades.
The new Dash Charge, Evasive Attack or Ship Health upgrades (just examples of new upgrades that will be included) will appear with a lower chance than e.g. Ship Speed.
The main weapon upgrades are now also more individual to each ship class.
Some upgrades will also have negative impacts and need to be carefully considered. For example, the Fire Rate upgrade for the Blaster class will slow your ship down while firing. This can of course be countered with increasing your ship speed - But it's not as much of a "no-brainer" as it was before.
In the current version, it takes quite some time until your ship can feel really powerful and some upgrades are really only noticeable after a couple of upgrades.
This will also change a lot in 2.0!
As you could quickly rack up certain upgrades before (due to the option to purchase multiple upgrades per wave) I had to balance them to a pretty high level - Level 20 was the "soft cap" for ship upgrades.
In 2.0, the soft cap is at Level 10. That results in each upgrade having a much more noticeable effect.
Another change will be made to the way you can heal up your ship.
Right now you can purchase ship heals as part of the normal upgrade pool. This lead to an interesting choice for players as you know the price for the heal will increase with every purchased heal. I liked that idea of limited supplied for heals but I still didn't like the idea of healing as an upgrade.
Healing was now moved to a separate Ship Module, purchaseable in the Upgrade Menu:
The Repair Bot.
This can be used once per charge in-between waves. The amount of charges can be increased to a certain point via the Upgrade Menu, but you can also get additional charges as upgrades form the upgrade pool (but they are rare, so it can be a tough choice).
Eventually, Repair Bots will also be dropped in-game, but I am not sure on that at the moment.
The beta test will solve the decision for sure.
[h3]Menu Upgrades[/h3]
The Upgrade Menu design was already overhauled in 1.0.8 - and the reason behind it was mostly preparations for 2.0!
In general, the way the Upgrade Menu works won't be changed, you will still get the Tokens you earned in-game as a currency outside of the game to purchase upgrades in the Upgrade Menu.
In 2.0 you will get more options for upgrades and those upgrades will sometimes have preconditions.
So you will only be able to purchase e.g. the new upgrade Hunterswarm Launcher if you have Dash and Missiles upgraded.
This will help new players to not be overwhelmed with choices in the beginning and give more seasoned players unlocks to work towards.
[h3]Ingame Specials[/h3]
If you already played Beat Invaders a little bit you probably noticed that sometimes you can shoot a fat Laser Beam (known as the Hyperbeam) or get an Attack Boost that will increase your Fire Rate and make you invulnerable.
Right now these additional Skills known as Specials are automatically activated on pickup.
This lead to some frustration with players picking up a Hyperbeam just for it to be wasted on the last two remaining enemies.
In a past Update, this behaviour was changed so the Hyperbeam was only fired when you pressed the fire button - but it could still lead to frustrating moments when there are two enemies left and you have no other way of getting rid of them but to fire.
This whole system will be overhauled and expanded.
In 2.0 you will get a new, dedicated button to activate Specials that you picked up.
In the lower right corner of the screen there will be an icon, showing you if you have currently a Special picked up that is ready to use.
Your ship can only hold one Special at a time.
So you sometimes need to choose to use your Special at a certain time to pick up a new one or actively decide to let a new Special pass your ship to keep your current Special for later use.
There will also be some new Specials and the current two specials are overhauled a bit.
New Specials include a two-bar Heal, an Invunerability Shield, a Token Pickup Magnet and maybe more!
[h3]And more![/h3]
You can look forward to new Event Wave types, new Enemies, and new Encounters that will spice up each run!
In 2.0, the game will be split up into four Sectors:
Each Sector will feature a unique appearance and, if everything works out on a different aspect of 2.0 (eventually there will be a cool suprise), a unique playlist.
Sector 2, Aeris Station, will also feature a new boss encounter at the end of the Sector - So fighting your way into the Tartarus Colony won't be easy!
The goal for the future will be to have one boss encounter at the end of each Sector - but this will take a little longer and I am looking forward to have more cool content updates for the future!
I hope this change will give you the feeling of progressing and moving through a universe instead of just being stuck in a long, uniform tunnel.
At the moment, the difficulty level seems too easy for a lot of you.
I hope to improve this with a balancing changes. Those will include a rebalance of certain ship class upgrades, e.g. adjusting the overall power of the Spreadshot class. But it will also include rebalancing enemy health and aspects like player health from the upgrade menu.
Playing a bit rewards enough Upgrade Tokens to upgrade Player Health to pretty crazy values. This in combination with the ingame heal/repair Upgrades can be enough to make the ship very tanky - to the point where you can just take hits and don't need to really care a lot about it.
This will be tackled by introducing a cap to this upgrade in 2.0 - You will still be able to upgrade your ships maximum health via rare ingame Upgrades - but this will level the playground for players to stop the "grind" to a bigger and bigger high score.
Another balancing change will change how the prices in the Upgrade Menu work.
They will have an exponential growth in their price from upgrading them and will also increase the prices of all other upgrades.
That will result in having to think more which upgrade to get at which point to get the best out of your Upgrade Tokens.
Some of the Upgrades will also receive ingame Upgrade counter-parts to further enhance the ability - for example: the Dash ability now works using charges. These charges can be increased to a maximum of three with rare in-game Upgrades to give you more manouverability.
You can get the first charge and unlock the ingame Upgrades via the Upgrade Menu. Further charges will only appear in-game.
A balancing change to enemies will include just buffing them more regulary with more health as sometimes, waves were evaporated in mere seconds, especially in higher levels.
The ship classes will also get some more changes.
The Pulse Blaster class was often seen as the weakest one because of the single shot.
Even though Piercing is a powerful upgrade - it just couldn't cut it against the Spreadshot class or the insane penetration and crazy rate of fire on an Attack Boosted Railgun class.
The Pulse Blaster class will get an overhaul of the Width upgrade, now called Charge.
The Ship already starts with a Charge Level of one - meaning when you will not fire, your main weapon will charge up and fire more projectiles when you release the trigger.
This can be further upgraded to fire more projectiles, charge up quicker or make them more powerful when fully charged. There are also epic Upgrades that will make the Blaster class a ship to be taken serious when compared to the Spreadshot class.
The Railgun class is another class that was often overlooked - of course it will also receive some more balancing changes and powerups. And an epic Upgrade that will give the ship offensive capabilities while charging up the main weapon - which is something many considered as a "too-big" trade off to play the class.
Of course, a lot of other things will be changed, too. A lot of those have been requested in the community.
One of the most requested features was the Global Leaderboard.
In 2.0, the High Scores menu will feature a new global top score board.
I thought about this for quite a while, but at this point I am sure it will benefit all players.
The performance in general will get a big boost, especially in the late game when a lot of bullets are on the screen - I completely refactored how bullets are handled in the game and it allows for much, much more stuff going on without any performance hit.
[h3]And of course: THANK YOU for all the reports here on Steam and on the Discord.[/h3]
It really helps to identify those problems and most of the reported bugs are either already patched or will be patched in 2.0 - I hope you have a little more patience for some of the problems (Meteoroid waves, Fullscreen in some Linux distributions and some more).
There are still some really cool things waiting to be talked about or shown off.
I hope you are as excited as I am.
And again: There will be a beta test and if you are interested in taking part it would be best to join the Discord Server! Follow the link in the game or just click here.
Today I want to share some of the new features and changes that will come to the 2.0 update that will come to Beat Invaders soon.
[h3]One important thing before we get to the meat and potatoes.[/h3]
There will be a beta test and if you are interested in taking part it would be best to join the Discord Server! Follow the link in the game or just click here.
[h2]Challenges before 2.0[/h2]
Talking to a lot of you I found out some problems with the state that Beat Invaders is at the moment:
- Runs are too similar to each other.
- There is no feeling of progressing through a world.
- The game is too easy.
Of course there are also some bugs, balance issues and general feature wishes - I will talk about those in the last section of this post.
Runs are too similar
This seems like one of the main problems - and I totally agree.
Beat Invaders was not planned as a big game where you could sink hundreds of hours - that is also reflected in the price. But I still think runs should feel individual and offer suprises.
But what makes a run different from another?
In my opinion it comes down to two things:
Opportunities and importance of decisions.
[h3]Ingame Upgrades[/h3]
At the current version, upgrades are purchased during a run by paying for them with collected tokens.
After each wave you are offered three random upgrades. Each upgrade has a base cost of 3 Tokens and the price is increased by each purchased level per upgrade.
This results in less decision making because a good player earns so many tokens that, most of the time, all three upgrade choices can be purchased. Also cheap upgrades can just be picked up due to the low price at a later point when the player earns much more Tokens in a run than in the beginning.
This design will be overhauled in 2.0.
In 2.0 each Token that is picked up will act as an experience point and fill up an experience bar towards the next level. The way the Tokens act as a currency in the Meta Upgrade Menu will not be touched, but more on that later.
When you earned a level up, you will be offered three random upgrade options (just like before) and can select one of those per level up. After selecting that upgrade, the offered options will instantly be rerolled. So you have to make a decision which of the three you are going to pick up.
Experience levels will also be earned much faster in the beginning of the game to help you get much quicker into the action than before!
Another change to the run upgrades are that there are just many new options, some of those have preconditions that must be fulfilled for them to be added to the upgrade pool. Speaking of the upgrade pool - Upgrades now also have a rarity attached to them with a higher or lower chance for them to be offered as one of the three upgrades.
The new Dash Charge, Evasive Attack or Ship Health upgrades (just examples of new upgrades that will be included) will appear with a lower chance than e.g. Ship Speed.
The main weapon upgrades are now also more individual to each ship class.
Some upgrades will also have negative impacts and need to be carefully considered. For example, the Fire Rate upgrade for the Blaster class will slow your ship down while firing. This can of course be countered with increasing your ship speed - But it's not as much of a "no-brainer" as it was before.
In the current version, it takes quite some time until your ship can feel really powerful and some upgrades are really only noticeable after a couple of upgrades.
This will also change a lot in 2.0!
As you could quickly rack up certain upgrades before (due to the option to purchase multiple upgrades per wave) I had to balance them to a pretty high level - Level 20 was the "soft cap" for ship upgrades.
In 2.0, the soft cap is at Level 10. That results in each upgrade having a much more noticeable effect.
Another change will be made to the way you can heal up your ship.
Right now you can purchase ship heals as part of the normal upgrade pool. This lead to an interesting choice for players as you know the price for the heal will increase with every purchased heal. I liked that idea of limited supplied for heals but I still didn't like the idea of healing as an upgrade.
Healing was now moved to a separate Ship Module, purchaseable in the Upgrade Menu:
The Repair Bot.
This can be used once per charge in-between waves. The amount of charges can be increased to a certain point via the Upgrade Menu, but you can also get additional charges as upgrades form the upgrade pool (but they are rare, so it can be a tough choice).
Eventually, Repair Bots will also be dropped in-game, but I am not sure on that at the moment.
The beta test will solve the decision for sure.
[h3]Menu Upgrades[/h3]
The Upgrade Menu design was already overhauled in 1.0.8 - and the reason behind it was mostly preparations for 2.0!
In general, the way the Upgrade Menu works won't be changed, you will still get the Tokens you earned in-game as a currency outside of the game to purchase upgrades in the Upgrade Menu.
In 2.0 you will get more options for upgrades and those upgrades will sometimes have preconditions.
So you will only be able to purchase e.g. the new upgrade Hunterswarm Launcher if you have Dash and Missiles upgraded.
This will help new players to not be overwhelmed with choices in the beginning and give more seasoned players unlocks to work towards.
[h3]Ingame Specials[/h3]
If you already played Beat Invaders a little bit you probably noticed that sometimes you can shoot a fat Laser Beam (known as the Hyperbeam) or get an Attack Boost that will increase your Fire Rate and make you invulnerable.
Right now these additional Skills known as Specials are automatically activated on pickup.
This lead to some frustration with players picking up a Hyperbeam just for it to be wasted on the last two remaining enemies.
In a past Update, this behaviour was changed so the Hyperbeam was only fired when you pressed the fire button - but it could still lead to frustrating moments when there are two enemies left and you have no other way of getting rid of them but to fire.
This whole system will be overhauled and expanded.
In 2.0 you will get a new, dedicated button to activate Specials that you picked up.
In the lower right corner of the screen there will be an icon, showing you if you have currently a Special picked up that is ready to use.
Your ship can only hold one Special at a time.
So you sometimes need to choose to use your Special at a certain time to pick up a new one or actively decide to let a new Special pass your ship to keep your current Special for later use.
There will also be some new Specials and the current two specials are overhauled a bit.
New Specials include a two-bar Heal, an Invunerability Shield, a Token Pickup Magnet and maybe more!
[h3]And more![/h3]
You can look forward to new Event Wave types, new Enemies, and new Encounters that will spice up each run!
World Progression
In 2.0, the game will be split up into four Sectors:
- Novis Alpha
- Aeris Station
- Tartarus Colony
- Nox Nebula
Each Sector will feature a unique appearance and, if everything works out on a different aspect of 2.0 (eventually there will be a cool suprise), a unique playlist.
Sector 2, Aeris Station, will also feature a new boss encounter at the end of the Sector - So fighting your way into the Tartarus Colony won't be easy!
The goal for the future will be to have one boss encounter at the end of each Sector - but this will take a little longer and I am looking forward to have more cool content updates for the future!
I hope this change will give you the feeling of progressing and moving through a universe instead of just being stuck in a long, uniform tunnel.
Difficulty Level
At the moment, the difficulty level seems too easy for a lot of you.
I hope to improve this with a balancing changes. Those will include a rebalance of certain ship class upgrades, e.g. adjusting the overall power of the Spreadshot class. But it will also include rebalancing enemy health and aspects like player health from the upgrade menu.
Playing a bit rewards enough Upgrade Tokens to upgrade Player Health to pretty crazy values. This in combination with the ingame heal/repair Upgrades can be enough to make the ship very tanky - to the point where you can just take hits and don't need to really care a lot about it.
This will be tackled by introducing a cap to this upgrade in 2.0 - You will still be able to upgrade your ships maximum health via rare ingame Upgrades - but this will level the playground for players to stop the "grind" to a bigger and bigger high score.
Another balancing change will change how the prices in the Upgrade Menu work.
They will have an exponential growth in their price from upgrading them and will also increase the prices of all other upgrades.
That will result in having to think more which upgrade to get at which point to get the best out of your Upgrade Tokens.
Some of the Upgrades will also receive ingame Upgrade counter-parts to further enhance the ability - for example: the Dash ability now works using charges. These charges can be increased to a maximum of three with rare in-game Upgrades to give you more manouverability.
You can get the first charge and unlock the ingame Upgrades via the Upgrade Menu. Further charges will only appear in-game.
A balancing change to enemies will include just buffing them more regulary with more health as sometimes, waves were evaporated in mere seconds, especially in higher levels.
The ship classes will also get some more changes.
The Pulse Blaster class was often seen as the weakest one because of the single shot.
Even though Piercing is a powerful upgrade - it just couldn't cut it against the Spreadshot class or the insane penetration and crazy rate of fire on an Attack Boosted Railgun class.
The Pulse Blaster class will get an overhaul of the Width upgrade, now called Charge.
The Ship already starts with a Charge Level of one - meaning when you will not fire, your main weapon will charge up and fire more projectiles when you release the trigger.
This can be further upgraded to fire more projectiles, charge up quicker or make them more powerful when fully charged. There are also epic Upgrades that will make the Blaster class a ship to be taken serious when compared to the Spreadshot class.
The Railgun class is another class that was often overlooked - of course it will also receive some more balancing changes and powerups. And an epic Upgrade that will give the ship offensive capabilities while charging up the main weapon - which is something many considered as a "too-big" trade off to play the class.
Feature requests, Bugs, General things
Of course, a lot of other things will be changed, too. A lot of those have been requested in the community.
One of the most requested features was the Global Leaderboard.
In 2.0, the High Scores menu will feature a new global top score board.
I thought about this for quite a while, but at this point I am sure it will benefit all players.
The performance in general will get a big boost, especially in the late game when a lot of bullets are on the screen - I completely refactored how bullets are handled in the game and it allows for much, much more stuff going on without any performance hit.
[h3]And of course: THANK YOU for all the reports here on Steam and on the Discord.[/h3]
It really helps to identify those problems and most of the reported bugs are either already patched or will be patched in 2.0 - I hope you have a little more patience for some of the problems (Meteoroid waves, Fullscreen in some Linux distributions and some more).
Closing words
This was quite a long post - but still not everything has been said about 2.0!There are still some really cool things waiting to be talked about or shown off.
I hope you are as excited as I am.
And again: There will be a beta test and if you are interested in taking part it would be best to join the Discord Server! Follow the link in the game or just click here.
New Upgrade Screen
New Controls menu with customizable controls
