StarVaders News

Hey everyone!

We honestly can’t believe we’re saying this so soon after our launch but we have just reached over 500 reviews and are now ranked as Overwhelmingly Positive by Steam. This is a dream come true for us, and one that we couldn’t have reached without all of your support!



Thank you so much for reviewing our game, our first few days have been full of reading feedback, planning future content and squashing bugs. Please keep them coming, it helps us a whole bunch!

We've not just been squashing bugs, here's a few other things we've deployed since release:

• Balance Changes based on feedback
  
• QoL improvements for the true ending
  
• Game customization options including a save scumming mode
  

More to come! We're keeping an eye on everywhere, including the Steam Forums and our Discord.

Much Love,

The Pengonauts Team

First up, a warning: IF YOU ARE PLAYING ON MAC, BACKUP YOUR SAVE FILES. We will be adding Steam Cloud support to Mac soon, but are unsure how it will affect the game if you played on multiple devices. Our apologies if something happens to them!

For anyone looking for save files for the MAC version. It's at "/Users/USERNAME/Library/Application Support/com.Pengonauts.StarVaders".

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Hope you all had a great weekend! Got some great feedback from a very wide range of types of players, they've all been super useful! We're only 3 people on the team (2 programmers and 1 artist), so it will take some time to fix everything, but we're hard at work!

Here are some of the notable changes in this patch:

• 5x Shift
  
• 2x Fire!
  
• 2x Triple Fire!
  
• 1x Nova Bomb
  

Roxy is the weakest pilot on higher difficulties, but her deck is great to introduce the game with - so what I did was keep the tutorial deck the same, but changed her deck after the tutorial run. Gunner struggles a lot because of their weaker movement, so I brought Triple Fire! into her starting deck as an extra AOE option that can target further invaders.



Vengoid+ now moves erratically, instead of giving Shields.

Vengoid Plus is one of the hardest invaders to deal with in Post-Apocalypse +, there's not a lot of time nor leeway to deal with them and the Shield makes it much more tedious to fight against. Shield was a boring ability anyway! Erratic movement now challenges the player in a slightly different way while still keeping the identity.



Hemophage fight has been quite confusing and difficult for a lot of players, and a very long fight as well. We've cut down their health pool, updated their description, and added more visual indicators to be more clear that the "purple" hemocytes should be destroyed since those are the ones that will channel doom. To balance this change, we've also shortened the turn limit.



[Spoiler] The Overseer fight for the True Ending can occasionally be a big pain point for players, particularly if it's the first time they encounter it - it doesn't help that the transitions are kinda badly implemented timing-wise. I've made changes to address some of the issues:

• (from patch 1.0.3) You now draw 3 cards and reset energy on phase 1 -> 2 transition.
• On each phase transition, you now keep all your puppets. (If they were in the "head" zone, they move to the bottom side of the grid)
• The "Assist" cards that drop as pickups to help on the final turn have a glowing visual indicator now.
• I've added more descriptions for the final phase for the Hearts and the Blooms.
• Phase transition's timing has been improved so that you don't get screwed if you overheat / use an end-of-turn attack to trigger the phase transition.

[h2]Other changes:[/h2]

• Noel's Novalanche now costs 1.
  
• Added backup loggerdata in case of steam cloud issues.
  
• Changed order of Act 3 invader unlocks for smoother complexity ramp (Void Rifts before Pulsars)
  
• Fixed Magical Gun not appearing in the pool.
  
• Fixed Parry, now works with Deflector / Reef Assault (the Charge will be dropped as pickup on the grid)
  
• Fixed Echo+ counting Dummy or Ticks for self-destructing
  
• Fixed Helping Hand no longer showing up as Used
  
• Fixed doubled 3D Printers now properly shoes up as Used
  
• Fixed Refresh drawing 5 cards instead of 3
  
• Fixed Pickup Rarity not being shown in the info panel
  
• Fixed Zombie component sometimes causing Haunting to go infinite (the hat kept moving between two summons)
  
• Fixed 0 cost triggers being inconsistent with 0 cost cards with reduced cost (it was because their cost was negative lol)
  
• Fixed Piercing Bullets + Lazer Bullets interaction in Japanese
  
• Fixed Oru's ability not working sometimes.
  
• Fixed an infinite loop caused sometimes by Hook Jab.
  
• Fixed a Task Engine crash involving Nessie.
  
• Ticks getting the Erratic modifier and teleporting.
  
• Recharging a random summon no longer targets unchargeable Bombs with Blast Legion
  
• Polymorph no longer spawns Care Package (a removed item)
  
• Fixed Transmogrify interaction with Warp
  
• Fixed Chronosphere not removing Odeus' bullet attacks.
  
• Many small localization changes
  

Again, thanks so much for playing the game and sending over the bug reports! We will keep working on improving the game, hope you enjoy!

Thanks,
- Pengonauts


HOTFIX -

Heya, another day, another patch.

We really appreciate all the bug reports and the feedback that's been coming in! Some notable changes in this update include:

• A new Save Scum extras option that makes it so when you exit and resume an encounter, it starts from start of the fight instead of where you left off.
  
• [Spoiler]Overseer Phase 2 transition now resets your energy and draws 3 cards for you

Tweaked some of the encounter algorithm to create less "really bad" encouters.

Other:

• Fixed gamepad input resetting when rewinding
  
• Fixed a Nessie task engine crash when it eats a bomb in phase 2
• Fixed Chain Lightning and Translocate, now playable without summons
  
• Fixed Salve causing everything to become free when combined with Cold Star
  
• Fixed not having any rewards anymore when using Infinite Rerolls to reroll rewards for a long time
  
• Fixed some visual bugs in the glossary involved artifact & their completion stars
  
• Fixed a few localization issues
  
• Fixed Red Brand showing up in double artifact reward
  
• Attempted fix on inconsistency in achievement for not picking up artifacts
  
• Hypermode Shun now correctly starts with 2 Battery.
  

Unless there are some serious issues we will likely not have a patch during the weekend, so see you next week! Keep slaying those invaders!

If you are enjoying your time it helps us out so much to leave a review!

We also have a fun discord community you can join here. We've got both long time players and newcomers all discussing strategies and showing off their decks. We will also be starting some cool activities soon inside the discord server!

Thanks,

- Axolotl

Wow, it's been great to see all the feedback so far.

We've added a few more options in the settings menu for you to customize how you wanna play the game. Although the "axolotl's prefered way" to play remains the same, more options never hurt anybody!

Sorry if you encountered that major looping softlock when losing in the Overseer fight, this has been fixed! If you are still in a run and it is still not working you might need to delete that run from the main menu (or abandon the run).

[h2]New Gameplay Options
[/h2]

• Added a button in the settings to unlock only pilots and the daily run
• Added an Extras option to made Chrono Rewinds during the encounter NOT reshuffle your deck.
  
• Added an Extras option to give infinite Chrono Tokens.
  

[h2]Other[/h2]

• Added an option to remove the "F2 Bug Report" prompt
  
• Buffed Noel, she now starts with an Artillery Fire!
  
• Added the Bomb keyword to entities that are considered Bombs.
  
• Rerolling fragments of LINK always gives a different modifier
• Fixed a major bug that happens when you lose against the Overseer
• Attempting a fix on missing resolutions based on base monitor resolution
  
• Attempting a fix on a bug that prevented the settings menu from applying changes
  
• Fixed a Task Engine Crash with the Grandmaster
• Fixed a Task Engine Crash involving Transmogrify and special upgrade cards (like Shadow Kunai)
  
• Fixed Ricochet Fire! + Lazer Bullets being 1 tile too short
  
• Fixed Enhance (Keeper spell) not targetting random cards
  
• Fixed Thundersquall - now correctly only targets invaders, and range is accurate
  
• Fixed a few localization strings and incorrect tags
  
• Fixed bug preventing typing 1, 2, 3 in the seed
  
• Attempting to fix a bug caused by patches messing with save files (caused you to start a run with the deck from the previous run)
  

This is just a first batch of bug fixes, we've still got a few to tackle. Thank you for the meal! (axolotls eat bugs)

Keep sending them over!

- Axolotl

Thanks for all the bug reports! We're onto them - just a small casual Day 0 patch to fix some of the reported ones! This is going live for PC right now, will be coming to Mac a bit later.

• Added our publisher's logo to the bootup, woops
  
• Fixed a black screen softlock when you lose against the OVERSEER
• Made the Tip Jar more obvious when you gotta click on it for an unlock
  
• Fixed a bunch of localization reports/ suggestions, keep them coming!
  
• Fixed multiple More Info images showing up on screen
  

We're looking into some of the resolution issues as well.

Thank you for playing the game, keep the reports coming! If you are enjoying the game please leave a review! It helps us out a lot.

- Axolotl