NeuroSquad - Slay the Horde News

Hello Slayers!

It's been a while since the last time, so this will be a long post with lots of explanations about what I've been working on, current changes, and future plans. I'd also like to give you a little sneak peek of what's coming.



[h2]Valve's changes on how demos work on Steam[/h2]

Let's start with the current changes. As you may or may not know, Valve recently made some changes regarding demos. As part of that, demos now have the chance to appear in more places on Steam, which I believe is a great change.

Unfortunately, since NeuroSquad's demo has been out for a long time, it doesn't have access to all the same benefits as new demos. I've been working on a brand new second Demo for some time, so this opportunity would have been perfect for that otherwise. Ultimately, I decided to remove the old demo until I figure out how to proceed.



Overall, Steam has shown again that they listen to developers' feedback, so I trust their changes to have a positive effect. I'm hoping I can still release a Prologue for NeuroSquad in the future, with all the things I have for it, as originally planned. (More on that below.)

[h2]About the old demo[/h2]

So the old demo no longer appears on the game's store page. Instead of pushing smaller updates to it, I've been working on a big one for Demo 2. (I talk about my thought process below.) In hindsight, I should have done a public Playtest from the beginning instead of a demo, and I believe the demo was made available a little too early anyway, but I've learned from this, and I will definitely do a (limited-access) playtest before the final release.

Still, it has been great for getting feedback (feedback that I'm extremely thankful for 🤍), and it has served its purpose. With all the development progress I'll detail below, the old demo no longer felt representative of the game. It no longer presented the game in the best light.

[h2]About the upcoming Demo 2[/h2]

I'm currently in the process of polishing the second demo. It needs some more time in the oven, but good news is that everything I make for that can go straight into the final game as well, so there won't be such a long wait before the 1.0 release in the future.

I'm refactoring the whole game, making every aspect of it more performant, more expandable, and just generally easier to work with. The purpose of this is to be able to add new content and make changes way faster than before. This is already happening in regard to the new content I'm adding to Demo 2.



As I was working on performance optimization, I kept thinking "I will just add this one more thing, and then I'm done". Every time I finished one aspect of the process, I discovered another little detail that I wanted to fix before pushing an update. I felt like it would be half-assing it if I left any inefficiencies in the game, and I just kept going deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole.

I apologize for not communicating more clearly about this since the last update. The reason for that was that a lot of times I felt like I was very close to the finish line, and the update can go live soon. But then I kept moving the goalpost, for the reasons I mentioned above.

The other thing about optimization is that it's the kind of change that (if all goes well) will not really be an obvious change. It's an "under the hood" thing, with no visible difference to the game (other than that it runs smoother of course). The more time passed since the last update the more I felt that I needed to add new content as well, something that actually adds to the game. So yes, the second demo will be a content update as well. (See below.)



Ever since NeuroSquad was first made available, I received a lot of helpful feedback, and incorporated these suggestions to new builds of the game. (See all the previous changelogs here, where I marked every change that was based on player feedback.) This means I had to prioritize which piece of advice to focus on first, since I was updating the game regularly, and not all of them could fit into the timeframe of a single update.

Now I wanted to take a different approach. Since there will be a whole new demo anyway, I'm implementing all of the remaining feedback I had received. This is a more efficient way to do this, because making incremental changes, generating builds, testing them, uploading them... all of this takes extra time. So instead, the new demo will have all of your feedback that I added to my list of things to implement. This time there's no need to prioritize, I'm going all in.

With that in mind, let's talk about content in the upcoming Demo 2:




(Work in progress Hub area, subject to change.)

• A Hub area that acts as a base for your characters. This expands the meta-progression upgrade framework, replacing the UI-only menu system in the previous demo.
  
• Elite gear system. This was originally intended for the 1.0 release only, but I decided to incorporate it into the new demo as well. Elite gear is a new way to make your characters permanently stronger, and enhance their special abilities (or add new ones).
  
• Character mastery. This is tied to the Elite gear system. You will get rewarded for playing well with your favorite characters.
  
• A full revamp of the upgrade placement system. During a run, you will be able to restructure your loadout at any time, swap upgrades, or put some of them to the side. (There will also be tutorialization for picking and placing upgrades, valuable for new players.)
  
• All planned changes implemented. As mentioned above, every piece of feedback that I received from you and wanted to add, will be added. As well as all of my ideas that I had throughout the old demo period. Genuinely everything overhauled.
  
• Improved performance. I'll write about the details of optimization extensively in another post.
  

The new demo will go live as soon as it's done and tested, and there will be more pre-release stuff to come after that. As I mentioned, overhauling the underlying systems means that new content can be added much more quickly, and changes can be made more easily. Putting in this work now is an investment into the future, resulting in a more stable and quicker-to-expand game.

So some time after Demo 2, I'm planning to publish a Prologue as well, which will include new game mechanics, a new map, new characters, new upgrades, new enemies, and more. I decided to do this because I want to give a piece of the game away for free to keep (as a complete package, as opposed to a demo, which is more like a... well, a demonstration).

Here's a little sneak peek:


More info on that later.



Lastly, I'd like to thank you for sticking with me throughout the dev process! All the suggestions, the positive feedback, the wishlists and follows, all of that means a lot to me! I've learned a lot and I'm very excited to soon be able to finally share the improvements.

Also, thanks to Valve for not putting a character limit on these news posts, this was a long one haha

Stay tuned, and have a good day!

- Matt

WePlay 2023 will happen 18th-19th November at Hall H4 of Shanghai World Expo Exhibition & Convention Center, China! We are glad that [NeuroSquad] can participate in the Expo along with other excellent games. And we will bring the best of [NeuroSquad] to you!
Our booth will be at C04, and we are looking forward to seeing you!

[h2] Demo 0.3.7.1 changelog (Quick fix)[/h2]

• Fixed the bug that used to cause the default input key bindings to not line up neatly in the settings menu. Now the keyboard and mouse-related inputs are in the first column, gamepad inputs are in the second, and the third column is available for any extra bindings you may want to set up (able to display both keyboard and gamepad).
  
• Changed some temporary Chinese translations added by me with the last update to properly translated ones.
  

Hello, all!

I'm excited to share the latest update to the demo, which includes some balance tweaks and QOL improvements. Recently NeuroSquad has made an appearance in some online festivals (most recently the Roguelike Celebration, but also was on the Steam page of Realms Deep and DevPlay), resulting in some important feedback from a larger set of players. Many suggestions are still in development, and I plan to include more of them in the coming updates.


[h2]Version 0.3.7 is up![/h2]

With this update I focused mostly on implementing suggestions from the community, and adding quality of life improvements. There's still a lot I want to do with the demo, So while I'm working on optimization (which is a loooong process and frankly, a huge rabbit hole), I thought I'd publish this update with some of the changes that I implemented based on feedback. (This update lines up well with the game being selected for the Bullet Heaven Festival, more on that below.)

Here you can find the full list of changes:

[h2]0.3.7 Changelog[/h2]

• 🤜🤛 [Based on feedback]: Increased the number of enemies spawning in the early game of the demo stage (waves 2, 5, and 7), and increased the cap of maximum enemies allowed in the beginning.
  
• Adjusted the XP gain in the beginning to balance the higher number of enemies.
  
• 🤜🤛 [Based on feedback]: Removed the reloading mechanic, as people found it unsatisfying. Since it was part of the manual shooting method, reworked that too, now there are three options: auto-fire with manual aim, auto-aim, and on-the-fly auto-aim, as requested by players:
  
• 🤜🤛 [Based on feedback]: Implemented a dynamic auto-aim system: when not moving, the character aims automatically. While running, the character aims in the direction of movement.
  
• Added a new key binding for quickly switching between shooting methods: toggle for the preferred auto-aim method. If auto-aim is turned off in the settings, it toggles between "off" and the regular auto-aim.
  
• 🤜🤛 [Based on feedback]: Added the option to reset the key bindings to the defaults.
  
• Rebalanced the fire rate of the Helldart, the Biosense mines, and the Spark cannon. Lowered their cap, and made their starting values higher for the hero.
  
• Increased the lifetime of Biosense mines.
  
• 🤜🤛 [Based on feedback]: Fixed a bug that allowed the level of implants to display higher than their maximum levels, if they were leveled up before their cap was tweaked in previous updates. (Used to apply to Neo-cortex).
  
• Slightly increased the starting pickup range (from 300 to 350 units).
  
• 🤜🤛 [Based on feedback]: Changed the way the Biosense mines react to the Ghost detonator being applied: now the mine deals 2.5 X base damage (like usual) instead of just 1 dmg, and the Ghost detonator's effect is applied to the scattered bullets only. This ensures the mines still damage enemies, even if the bullets have Energy locker on (which would otherwise result in 0 damage most of the time).
  
• Reduced the range of the Godlight weapon (default bullet lifetime from 1 sec to 0.7 sec).
  
• 🤜🤛 [Based on feedback]: Changed the damage increase of the Microshard injector weapon mod from 50% to 30%.
  
• Changed the first objective timer: now it's only required to survive for 3 minutes instead of 5 for the reward.
  
• Added notifications under the XP bar that appear upon completing an objective.
  
• Added the two Chinese logos into the game (for the main menu and pause menu).
  

[h2]Some notes[/h2]

❗ Important note: ❗
Since I've made some changes to the inputs (deprecated two and added a new one: toggle auto-aim), the key bindings had to be reset to the defaults for everyone who has played the demo previously. You don't have to do anything, but if you were using custom input settings, you'll have to set it up in the controls settings again.
I apologize for this, please keep in mind that the game is still in development and changes like this are expected for now.

❗ Also... ❗
The current version has a known bug, unfortunately the order of the key bindings in the settings menu can sometimes get reshuffled, so similar keys (such as ones for keyboard VS ones for gamepads) might not always line up neatly underneath each other. This doesn't affect anything (apart from clarity), but my very next task is to hunt down this bug. Hopefully will be fixed in another update soon. - Fixed!

[h2]Performance optimization progress[/h2]

I'd like to share some info about the progress I've been making regarding performance improvements. This in my case mostly means diving into the engine code and making custom solutions for the things that are the most demanding in NeuroSquad.
So the game is being developed in Unreal Engine, which is a powerful beast, and gives many well thought-out things out of the box. But of course, every game is different, and has different needs. For NeuroSquad in particular, I quickly found that handling a large amount of player-bullets and enemies is where the bottleneck lies. On the bullets front, I decided to use my own particle-driven solution early on, which has been working great so far (I might post some stress tests and benchmarks later if there's interest in this kind of stuff).
Now I'm in the middle of tackling the other big performance-hitter, the large number of enemies. Testing shows promising results so far (with clusters, a custom movement controller, vertex animation, etc), hopefully you can see the effects of these in the game soon.


[h2]NeuroSquad is part of Bullet Heaven Fest![/h2]

I'm excited to share that NeuroSquad has been selected to be part of Bullet Heaven Fest, which starts... today! I'm honored to be included among such great games that have been inspiring me throughout development.

As the organizers say, "You'll be flooding the screen with your own arsenal in a storm of firepower that puts traditional bullet hell games to shame." - Indeed. Check out the sale page here:

https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41046058/sale/BulletHeavenFest

[h2]Follow the development on Discord[/h2]

If you'd like to discuss changes and follow the development of the game, you can find me on the official NeuroSquad Discord server:



Happy slaying!

-Matt

[h2] Demo 0.3.6.2 changelog[/h2]

• Fixed a visual bug: after the previous demo update, the Cyber aura was visible in some places behind walls if the player was close to them.
  
• 🤜🤛 [Based on feedback]: Changed Fortune glitch to only activate when a boss chest is dropped (not on every split of the third boss).
  
• Rebalanced the Prominent impact implant: it gives a 1% chance for enemies dropping crystals and an additional % per level up.
  
• The curse that only allows 1 upgrade choice now correctly negates any upgrades (and implants) that add more upgrade choices while it's active.
  
• Autoexec no longer counts freezing as a status effect for checking the number of effects.
  
• 🤜🤛 [Based on feedback]: Fixed the Holo-initializer and Drone initializer implants, on level 3 their effect had a very low chance of not activating due to an error in the randomization algorithm.