Athena Crisis News

In the past several months we have shipped many major updates to Athena Crisis.

[h2]Messages[/h2]



Athena Crisis now has an elegant real-time messaging system built from templates, tags, and conjunctions. Players can communicate during a game, and help others with hints even across maps and campaigns. Popular messages will appear the multiverse to guide (or hinder) players. Messages that are liked often glow in gold, and the author receives a Chaos Star which they can use in the shop to buy unlocks.

[h2]New Campaign[/h2]



The new campaign, Waking the Colossus, by player iudiciis has been promoted into Curated Campaigns. The maps are well-designed, allow you to earn extra stars and you unlock a new unique skill at the end. Athena Crisis now features six curated campaigns and it’s been awesome to see so many content creators expand on the lore of the main story and its characters. There are many more curated campaigns coming that will keep you engaged for a long time!

[h2]Experimental Replays & Time Bank Timer[/h2]



In order to support the still young and evolving competitive scene, we have built a Replay feature. After a game concludes, you can instantly step through every action in a game, or sit back and watch the full replay.

The existing real-time timer for live games gives each player a specific amount of time per turn depending on how many units they are controlling. This system often gives players too much time, and can lead to stalling.

We launched a new timer system for invasions and PvP games that carries over across turns and counts down, with an increment added each turn. The new system makes real-time games go much faster!

[h2]Teleport Fields[/h2]



The Spaceship biome now features 6 individual Teleport fields that can be used to teleport your units across a map quickly. Each of the colors is only linked to Teleporters of the same color. Teleporters enable a few fun interactions, like dropping a unit from a transporter or spawning a new unit on a Teleporter to instantly transport them elsewhere!

[h2]Quality of Life[/h2]



Undo Actions: Up until recently, Athena Crisis only allowed undoing the whole turn. This worked well, and gave each action especially late into a turn a lot of meaning, but it was occasionally frustrating when moving a unit to the wrong field, especially on small screens. In addition to undoing a turn, you can now undo every action up until the beginning of your turn.
Replay Completed Levels: We implemented many requested features, like previewing the next campaign map and the ability to replay campaign maps at any time instead of just at the end of a campaign.
Performance: We deployed major performance improvements which will keep your computers cool, your batteries lasting longer, and your frame rate high. Athena Crisis is now faster than ever.

[h2]What else?[/h2]

• Invasions and skills were further improved and balanced. Some gameplay issues that stuck around for a while were also fixed, like the AI’s behavior in the Space biome, or how the Space biome handles entering and leaving a spaceship.
  
• We fixed more than 100 bugs and shipped over ten QoL improvements, new settings, and fun features like character silhouettes.
  

Silhouettes are a cute feature for storytelling in community campaigns! Speaking of campaigns – we are soon launching a new Curated Campaign and multiple new units. Watch out for even more updates!

Finally, we made dozens of improvements behind the scenes to ensure the Athena Crisis tech stack stays modern, bug-free, fast, and maintainable for the long-term. Since Athena Crisis is open source, we want to keep the codebase current so that developers can study how the game is made and build their own modern JavaScript-based games. Check out the source code here: https://github.com/nkzw-tech/athena-crisis

Join our Discord to get the latest news even faster: https://discord.gg/athenacrisis

We shipped a number of quality-of-life and performance improvements to make Athena Crisis more fun and faster than ever!

Development of Athena Crisis is currently focused on 3 major area: Quality-of-Life, Performance and Mobile:



There were two major quality-of-life improvements in the past month:

Undo Actions: Up until recently Athena Crisis only allowed undoing the whole turn. This worked well, and gave each action especially late into a turn a lot of meaning, but it was occasionally frustrating when moving a unit to the wrong field, especially on small screens. In addition to undoing a turn, you can now undo every action up until the beginning of your turn. Undo was also added to the Map Editor and the demo at athenacrisis.com. If you are interested in how it works, check out the code here.



Custom Movement Paths on Mobile: In fog you might want to avoid certain fields if you know an opponent is there. On Desktop, you can use your cursor to “draw” a path for a unit to follow. On Mobile, however, this doesn’t work. Moving a finger across the screen initiates panning/scrolling instead. Mobile browsers also give little control for gestures or disabling scrolling. Nevertheless, I wanted the UX for this to feel as natural as possible. The map now locks in when using a finger to move across the blue movement radius, but you can still pan the map outside of a unit's movement radius. Instead of adding a new type of interaction, this smoothly integrates with how movement already works. While just a few lines of code, it took half a day to put together to get the interactions to feel just right and make them work properly on mobile: disable scrolling, handle every input device at the same time, select the field when lifting a finger but only after drawing a custom path, and more. It made me appreciate the amount of micro-interactions and states that exist for each field (see Mask.tsx).



It felt incredibly rewarding to ship these features. Undo and touch interactions are so challenging to get right, but as you can see in the above code – that is running in production right now – their implementations are quite elegant.



We didn’t invest in performance monitoring and development moved incredibly fast in the past six months. Together, those two things always result in the same issue: performance will regress. Recently Athena Crisis has been a bit sluggish, and draining battery.

We deployed major performance improvements this week which will keep your devices cool, batteries lasting long, and frame-rate up and to the right. Athena Crisis is now faster than ever.



The iOS App is mostly complete and was approved by Apple, and the Android App is just missing a few things related to In-App-Purchases. Keep an eye out for the release date!


In addition to the above we updated the Desktop clients, fixed bugs, improved balancing and focused on upgrading to all the most modern tech to ensure Athena Crisis can keep shipping and moving fast.

Athena Crisis is finally starting to feel complete, and today is the best day to try it!

It’s cold outside, but Athena Crisis is warming up with a new deal.

Grab Athena Crisis at 25% off in the Steam Winter Sale - our deepest discount yet! 🔥

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2456430/Athena_Crisis?snr=2___

Time for the December monthly update!

Athena Crisis will be participating in the Steam Winter Sale, where you can grab it for 25% off (the deepest discount we’ve had all year) - we’re biased, but we think it makes a perfect gift.

[h2]Yuki[/h2]
Who doesn’t love a Christmas flamethrower? This month we’re spotlighting Yuki, a lovable and hot-headed recruit. Just don’t make them in charge of roasting the marshmallows.

Yuki comes from the cold north, but brings warmth with them wherever they go. They look up to more experienced fighters to help them know when to turn down the intensity. As the leader of the flamethrower elites, they are known for reveling in the mayhem of a battle and getting a little bit carried away when it comes to burning things down.

[h2]Our Journey through the Multiverse[/h2]
Looking back, 2024 has been a great year for Athena Crisis. The game launched in early access in March, hit 1.0 in September, and we’ve been releasing on-going updates and improvements ever since. We really appreciate all of you who have played the game, left us a review, provided feedback in the Discord, and helped to make this game something great!

We want to give special thanks to all the members of the community that have been hard at work creating maps and campaigns for the benefit of other players.

Okay, on to the updates! There are fewer player-forward updates than last month’s roundup, as a lot of work is happening behind the scenes to prepare for the release of the mobile versions.

[h2]NEW AND IMPROVED[/h2]

• Improved: Transporter units
  When a transporter with units is moved, it now shows the moved icon above the "+".
  
• Improved: Mobile
  More mobile changes were shipped as part of app store reviews.
  

[h2]BALANCING[/h2]

• Changed: Acid Bomber Unit
  Increased movement from 4 to 5, increased defense from 50 to 60.
  
• Changed: Sneaky Dragon and Last Resort
  When healing Dragons or Zombies when these skills are equipped, the price for healing is now reduced
  

We hope you have a great end of year holiday season, spend time with loved ones, and the chance to play some community campaigns when you need a break. As always, if you have any feedback, please hop into the official Discord and let us know!

Athena Crisis is part of the Steam Autumn Sale, available for 20% off now through December 4th.

Check out our most recent Monthly Update for a full list of all the recent changes, fixes, and improvements we've made to the game.

They include a brand new curated campaign, Pressing Onwards, created by a member of the community. Completing the campaign unlocks a new skill, Seatbelts On, a fun skill focused on Jeeps and their leader, Remy.