Crab Champions News

Animation is by far my weakest area in game development so this overhaul was badly needed. The clunky placeholder animations that have been used for literally years now are finally gone!

[h3]New Grenade Throw Animation[/h3]


[h3]New Slide Animation[/h3]


[h3]New Melee Animation[/h3]


[h3]More Fluid Jumping[/h3]


Have a look at some comparisons of the old terrible animations compared to the new ones! Note that the new animations are not final yet but should be a big step up from the old ones. This animation pipeline is firmly in place now so I'm really excited to improve the enemy models and animations next.

[h3]Walk Comparison[/h3]


[h3]Jump Comparison[/h3]


[h3]Turn In Place Comparison[/h3]


All animations were actually authored in Unreal Engine itself using the amazing new Control Rig toolset. This saves a lot of time as I don't have to go back and forth between external software and import files after each iteration.




Grenade specific mods were introduced last month and are allowing me to create some much more powerful grenade buffs that can really synergize with your weapon to create interesting builds.

Here are some fun grenade mods added this month:

• Crystal Barrage: Chance for grenades to explode into a crystal barrage
  
• Fireworks: Chance for grenades to explode into fireworks that shoot in random directions
  
• Clone Explosion: Grenades spawn more grenades when exploding
  
• Spinning Blade: Chance for grenades to spawn a spinning blade when exploding, dealing damage to all nearby enemies for several seconds
  
• Dagger Blast: Chance for grenades to explode into a cluster of daggers
  
• Crit Grenade: Chance for grenades to crit when exploding
  
• Black Hole: Chance for grenades to spawn a black hole when exploding
  
• Chaotic Grenade: Grenades deal more damage but move in random patterns
  
• Snake Grenade: Grenades deal more damage but move in snakelike patterns
  

The final (for the beta) batch of weapon mods have been added this month! It's been really important to make sure that there are a nice wide range of mods to choose from even during the beta to allow for many different builds. Since you choose a specific weapon before starting a run, some mods are far better or worse depending on the weapon: for example the Uppercut mod deals bonus flat damage for every 5 shots fired: this synergizes nicely with fast firing rifles and is much less effective on slow firing shotguns and snipers.

• Targeting Shot: Shots that hit enemies spawn new shots that target other nearby enemies
  
• Zig Zag Shot: Shots deal more damage but fly in zig zag patterns
  
• High Caliber: Damage increased but clip size reduced
  
• Clip Shot: Damage increased for each bullet remaining in the clip
  
• Leech Shot: Chance to heal when dealing damage
  
• Sharp Shot: Shots deal additional flat damage
  
• Wind Up: Damage increased for each shot fired until reloading
  
• Long Shot: Shots have a longer range
  
• Steady Shot: Damage increased when aiming but reduced when hipfiring
  
• Trick Shot: Damage increased when hipfiring but reduced when aiming
  
• Boomerang Shot: Shots fly back towards you after a short time and have a longer lifetime
  
• Recoil Shot: Damage increased but firing knocks you back
  
• Streak Shot: Crit chance increased for each shot that hits an enemy in a row without missing
  
• Shrinking Shot: Shots initially deal more damage but shrink over time, dealing less damage
  
• Uppercut: Every fifth shot deals increased damage
  
• Precision: Damage increased for each shot you hit in a row without missing
  
• Exploding Shot: Chance for shots to explode on impact
  
• Juiced: Increased damage, fire rate and reload speed
  
• Accelerating Shot: Shots deal more damage but start slow and accelerate over time
  

These new mods below are triggered when firing your weapon: they inherit the effects of almost all other equipped mods: you can get some busted combinations here! All of the FX shown below are placeholder but you'll get an idea of how these mods will work.

• Fireworks: Small chance to fire fireworks with your shot
  
• Crystal Blast: Chance to fire a close range AOE blast with your shot
  
• Mace Balls: Small chance to fire mace balls along with your shot
  
• Sharpened Axe: Chance to fire a spinning axe along with your shot
  
• Fireball Cluster: Chance to fire a cluster of fireballs along with your shot
  
• Dagger Arc: Chance to fire an arc of daggers along with your shot
  

• Survival Enemy Variants
  It's been fun creating tougher versions of enemies that scale all the way up to elite or even boss variants. More of these tougher variants will show up as you get further into a run. Shown above are the new Ice Slug variants that explode into a freezing damage area!
  
  
• Crab Model Improvements
  It's not a very noticeable change but the crab is now fully symmetrical with new claws and has had many subtle texture improvements!
  
  
• Level Design Improvements
  While doing daily playtests, I'm constantly iterating on both how the levels look AND more importantly how they feel to play. Interestingly, wide open beaches seem to be much more fun to play compared to caves and other smaller islands.
  
  
• Survival Difficulty Levels
  I've put a lot of thought into how to make Survival mode challenging but still allow it to be fun and accessible at the same time. While Normal and Nightmare difficulties can do that, I'd like for players to be able to continue to escalate the challenge after each completed run to give them a building sense of mastery rather than going from Normal (a moderate challenge) to Nightmare (extremely hard) in one jump.
  
  To solve this, I'm testing a difficulty levels feature- each level adds a new rule that makes the game harder in some way: which of these rules are fun and also how many difficulty levels there will be is still to be decided (currently looking at about 10-20 difficulty levels). Ideally this system should give players a fun way to earn cosmetics and a reason to replay the game while increasing the challenge gradually rather than all at once. With this in mind, the potential level 20 difficulty is FAR harder than the original Nightmare difficulty was going to be.
  
  
  
  
• Audio Overhaul
  Many placeholder sounds have been replaced this month (crunchy explosions, whooshes while dashing, calming ocean soundscapes and much more!) as well as lots of overall sound mix adjustments to further increase awareness during gameplay. These changes will be showcased in an unedited gameplay video of a Survival run that'll be posted nearer to the release of the game.
  

That's it for this month, thanks for reading!



Join the Crab Champions Discord server: https://discord.gg/crabchampions
Follow Crab Champions on Twitter: https://twitter.com/crabchampions
Join the Crab Champions subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/CrabChampions/

At this point, the game is in great shape: the scope and gameplay loop are locked down and I'm playtesting daily to get it where it needs to be for release. The main things that I'll be focusing on moving forward are presentation and content: 3D assets, audio (including the soundtrack), animations, lighting, FX, levels and generally making the game feel polished (finally I'll be replacing these clunky movement animations!). As you'll see in this update, a lot of the changes come from frequent testing: I want any gameplay and balance issues to be solved BEFORE the game launches where possible and plan on using the early access period to add new content rather than to be reworking game mechanics. With that said, let's get into the new stuff added this month!


Many of the previous challenge island modifiers didn't feel all that challenging (like Low Gravity or Invisible Enemies) so they have been replaced with much more engaging challenge types.

• Mirrored Projectiles: Enemies fire projectiles back at you when hit
  
• Elemental Explosions: Enemies explode into a random elemental damage area when eliminated
  
• Dividing Enemies: Enemies divide into multiple weaker versions of themselves when eliminated
  
• Energy Rings: Enemies spawn energy rings when hit
  
• OTT: All explosions have a 5x larger radius!
  
• Careful Aim: Missing shots damages you!
  
• One Shot: Enemies can be eliminated in one hit but so can you!
  
• Shrapnel: Enemies explode into a burst of projectiles when eliminated
  

Previously, the main way of gaining speed was by sliding which often led to a spam strategy of constantly sliding in circles around enemies, easily dodging most projectiles. I wanted to tune the movement system to be more skill based and require timing, so a dash mechanic has been added as well as removing the ability to infinitely slide (you now lose speed if you slide for too long). Combining these mechanics, you can gain speed but also dodge enemy projectiles if dashing at the right moment. I'm currently finding the sweet spot between dashing and sliding to ensure that you can still have fast and fluid movement without it making the game too easy.

This also opens up a new category of cosmetics: dash trails! More on these in a future update.


Dashing of course nicely integrates with Racing mode, allowing for the optimal strategy between jumping, sliding and dashing to be developed across each course. I'm really excited to see what the speedrunning community will do with it. There have also been new perks added that reduce dash cooldowns and increase the number of dashes, allowing for some overpowered movement options in a Survival mode run!




After a bunch of great playtests, I noticed that when explaining the whole weapon mod / weapon leveling system to new players, it was more confusing than it needed to be. Especially when playing on controller, it felt a bit clunky and slow paced to have to manage your inventory and swap mod slots by hand (It's hard to even realize that you could put weapon mods on grenades for example) so I've settled on a few improvements that make the much game easier to understand and also stop you having to slow down in an otherwise fast paced game.

[h3]1: Grenade Mods[/h3]
Since weapon mods used to be interchangeable with grenades, I was a bit limited with the mod design and many weapon specific mods (like having a larger clip size) didn't make sense on grenades. On the flip side, many powerful mods more suited for infrequent grenades like black holes didn't make sense on fast firing weapons like the minigun. To solve this, I took the best weapon mods that make sense on grenades and added a bunch of grenade specific mods to form a new inventory category: Grenade Mods.

This means that there are 3 distinct "upgrade" pickup types in the game:

• Weapon Mods: Mods that influence each shot your weapon fires
  
• Grenade Mods: Mods that influence each grenade you throw
  
• Perks: Bonuses that don't directly affect each shot you fire but have an overall passive effect (like more movement speed) or are event based (like gaining more damage after finishing each island)
  

To further clear up any confusion between the different pickup types, a chest for a specific type of pickup will drop after each island rather than a chest containing a random mix of pickup types. For example Island 1 may drop a weapon mod chest, Island 2 a perk chest and so on.

Some examples of Grenade Mods:

• Ice Explosion: Chance for grenades to explode into an ice damage area, freezing all nearby enemies
  
• Glue Grenade: Grenades stick to enemies and have a delayed explosion
  
• Cluster Grenade: Throw a cluster of weaker grenades instead of a single grenade
  
• Energy Ring: Chance for grenades to explode into a damaging energy ring
  
• Chaotic Grenade: Grenades deal much higher damage but fly in random patterns
  
• Clone Grenade: Grenades that hit enemies spawn more grenades from the impact point
  
• Deja Vu: Grenades explode multiple times (this scales per level of the mod)
  
• Black Hole: Chance for grenades to spawn a black hole when exploding
  
• Spinning Blade: Chance for grenades to spawn a spinning blade when exploding
  

These mods essentially turn your grenade into a powerful tool to set up synergies with your primary weapon, which brings me to my next improvement!

[h3]2: No More Secondary Weapons[/h3]
In 100% of my playtests, the secondary weapon was ignored as players tend to want to stack all of their mods on one weapon for maximum effectiveness. This means that there's no real reason to have a secondary weapon at all! Since you can throw your grenade and also melee while shooting, you can make use of all of your inventory at once: this feels efficient and fun!

[h3]3: Weapon Selection[/h3]


While many games have lots of different weapons that can drop with fixed behaviors, the focus here is on letting you choose a base weapon and then use the countless combos of weapon mods to turn it into something new. By choosing and sticking with a specific weapon at the start of a Survival run, this functions like a class or loadout, allowing you to spend the run making a build around that weapon rather than constantly finding completely different weapons and pivoting.

Finding weapons mid run would make sense if there were many weapons in the game but since mods give weapons most of their interest, I thought that it was better to focus on a limited selection of core archetype weapons, each with their own set of mastery challenges and skins to unlock! The aim is for players to start coming up with builds for specific weapons as their knowledge deepens playing the game.

[h3]4: Progression[/h3]
With each weapon now offering mastery challenges, the progression system has been updated to help give players more reasons to play Survival runs.

When you first start the game, only 2 weapons will be unlocked: the Bamboo Rifle and the Claw Shotgun. Other weapons as well as mods and perks will be available to unlock with keys: the persistent currency that persists between runs. Keys are earned by completing weapon mastery challenges, as well as by defeating bosses. There'll be more info on the improvements to the progression system soon!


As part of my original plan to support more than just the four elemental damage types previously mentioned (ice, fire, lightning and poison), a new debuff system has been implemented. The full list of debuffs and their effects can be found below.

• Charm (Pink): If enemies are charmed, they heal you with their attacks (but if you are charmed, you also heal enemies!)
  
• Confusion (Multicolor): Movement directions are randomized and spread is heavily increased!
  
• Weak (Red): If weakened, outgoing damage is reduced
  
• Slow (Yellow): Movement speed is slowed
  
• Stun (White): Interrupts and prevents future attacks
  
• Ice (Blue): Prevents movement and attacks until thawed
  
• Fire (Orange): Damage over time is dealt when on fire. Can be extinguished with water
  
• Lightning (Purple): A percentage of damage taken is dealt to nearby enemies
  
• Poison (Green): Increases incoming damage and prevents all healing. Can be washed off with water
  

• New Destructible Rocks
  As part of my effort to add more variety to each island, there are a few more potential destructible rocks that can appear including challenge crystals (breaking them drops a good amount of crystals but summons high level enemies), black hole rocks, healing rocks, enemy spawners and more (in addition to the standard ice, fire, lightning and poison rocks that could show up before).
  
  
• Price Tags, Discounts and New Perks
  A random pickup in shops will be 30% off in each shop, with new UI added to show any discounts. In addition to this, a new discount based perk has been added called "Bargain Hunter" which gives a small chance for goods in the shop to be heavily (-90%) discounted.
  
  
• Faster Loading Times
  A lot of work has gone in behind the scenes this month to make sure that restarting (important to be zippy in a game where you die a lot) and moving from island to island is as fast and seamless as possible. I've been able to hugely cut down on loading times and completely remove loading screens during a Survival mode run. The clip above shows the expected loading time for almost any island, even when playing multiplayer!
  
  
• New Island Type: Rush
  This is a fast paced island type where the only goal is to eliminate as many enemies as possible before a timer runs out! It features a dynamic reward system that gives you the opportunity to score legendary loot if you are quick enough!
  
  
• New Island Type: Treasure
  If you choose the Random portal which occasionally appears between islands, there is a small chance that you'll be taken to a Treasure island which contains 2 free chests of a random rarity. If choosing a Random portal there is of course still a chance that you'll be thrown into a fight with an elite enemy, so come prepared!
  
  
• New Enemy Attack Types
  Enemies now have more attack patterns in their arsenal, from huge circular formations of projectiles to chaotic clusters!
  
  
• Flawless No Hit Bonus: Completing an island without taking any damage now grants a crystal bonus! This bonus increases with each island and is a nice reward for those skilled enough to pull it off.
  
  
• Temple Island Rework
  Temple islands show up near the end of each biome and are a true test of skill before the boss. They feature several areas separated by locked doors and contain enemy spawners that must be destroyed before moving to the next chamber. As mentioned in previous updates, temples are a great source of high quality loot so are well worth the added challenge!
  
  
• Hidden Loot!
  There is now a chance for bonus loot to spawn on each island, though it's usually somewhere hidden, requiring some platforming to find. Some bonus loot won't even be accessible without having several mobility perks (such as on top of cliffs).
  
  
• Soundtrack Update
  I've been chipping away at the soundtrack as usual, 3 more songs have been mastered and completed since the last update: very excited to share them with you!
  
  
• New Portal FX
  
  
• Bug Fixes + Balance Tweaks
  As always, countless bug fixes and balance tweaks have been made after playtesting to improve underperforming gameplay elements. Bouncing Shots for example has gotten a nice buff: as well as giving shots the ability to bounce, damage is now also doubled after each bounce!
  

Thanks for reading and for being patient with the development of the game.



Join the Crab Champions Discord server: https://discord.gg/crabchampions
Follow Crab Champions on Twitter: https://twitter.com/crabchampions
Join the Crab Champions subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/CrabChampions/

This month a lot of work has gone into increasing the replay value and variation of each Survival mode run. It's really important in any game with roguelike elements to have the potential for wildly different builds with a lot of difficult decisions to be made on each run. I felt that the game was lacking some of this depth so a big portion of the month was spent adding content and mechanics to give players more options. There'll be more on this next month with a look at the finalized weapon levelling system.







I've always wanted boss fights in Survival mode to be a lot more exciting than just facing a bullet sponge enemy doing basic attacks. After a few experiments and a lot of optimization, this bullet hell style encounter ended up working really well with the high mobility that you have as a player. It really increases the intensity compared to normal islands. The visuals and animations are still quite rough here (the boss itself will be fully redesigned, it's here mainly to test out the new mechanics) but the gameplay feels great and many of the other bosses will now feature more hectic, bullet hell attacks.





One of the most important parts of the shop in Survival mode is being able to experiment with weapon mods to create new builds. Without a target that has a damage per second indicator, there was a lot of guesswork in terms of the range and damage output of your build. Now there are multiple target dummies in the shop area, allowing you to clearly see how well your build is performing.







Being greedy and biting off more than you can chew, resulting in the end of a Survival run is always something that is really interesting to me. I've spent a good portion of the month revamping the old greed perk system in a way that offers a LOT of power to players but with some heavy drawbacks which can make for difficult decisions on each run.

The greed mechanics have been split into two sections: perks and totems.

Greed Perks: These offer a huge benefit but also come with a guaranteed downside. When you pick one up, it cannot be removed but has a lasting passive effect. They can be stacked for stronger effects as normal perks can.

• Leap Of Faith: Max health greatly increased, but fall damage is enabled
  
• Bribe: Max health greatly increased but lose crystals when taking damage
  
• Double Trouble: Max health greatly increased but so is enemy health
  
• Cracked Helmet: Block damage in front of you but take double damage from behind
  
• Heavy Armor: Gain immunity to a random elemental damage type but movement speed is reduced by 50%
  
• Glass Cannon: Damage massively increased but you lose most of your max health
  
• Playing With Power: Damage massively increased but you can hurt yourself
  
• Brute Force: Both outgoing and incoming damage heavily increased
  
• Beginner's Luck: All damage dealt has a chance to be greatly higher or greatly lower than usual
  
• Think Fast: Damage greatly increased at the start of each island, but decreases over time
  
• Metal Claw: Damage heavily increased but no more chests spawn for the next 10 islands
  
• Up The Ante: Damage greatly increased but easy portals no longer appear and more enemies spawn
  
• Untouchable: Damage is greatly reduced but is increased every time you eliminate an enemy. If you get hit, the damage boost is reset
  
• Slippery Slope: Gain crystals over time but also lose health over time
  
• Double Edged Sword: Gain crystals when dealing damage but lose crystals when taking damage
  
• Workaholic: Far more crystals drop when eliminating enemies but you lose most of your max health
  
• High Stakes: Far more crystals drop when eliminating enemies but elite and armored enemies have a chance to spawn instead of normal enemies
  
• Gambler: Chance for more crystals to drop when eliminating enemies but also a chance for no crystals to drop at all
  
• Cursed Lottery: Gain a gigantic amount of crystals but lose most of your max health
  
• High Roller: 50% chance for double chests to spawn but a 50% chance for no chests to spawn
  
• Hoarder: Double the chests spawn after each island but double the enemies also spawn
  
• Cursed Loot: Chance for shop loot to be free but also a chance for it to be empty
  
• False Confidence: Normal enemy health is reduced but boss health is greatly increased
  

Greed Totems: These have instant one-off effects (for example gain crystals but lose max HP) and can be repeatedly purchased (with the price exponentially increasing).

• Feeling Lucky: 50% chance to double max health, 50% chance to halve max health
  
• Last Resort: 33% chance to fully heal, 66% chance to take a small amount of damage
  
• Blood Money: Gain crystals but lose 33% of your health
  
• Instant Gratification: Instantly spawn a chest of a random rarity but lose 33% health
  
• Insurance: Gain 200 max health but lose all of your crystals
  
• Impatience: Upgrade a random perk tier but lose 25% health
  
• Focused Power: Lose a random 50% of your perks but gain +4 tiers on perks that remain
  
• Claw For A Claw: Lose 3 random perks but get a legendary perk
  
• Bill Pay: Gain 3 random perks or mods but increase future shop prices
  
• Scrap Metal: 50% chance to increase your weapon level, 50% chance to do nothing
  
• No Pain No Gain: Instantly get a level 10 weapon but lose 75% max HP
  
• Greed Heart: Gain a short term +500% boost in health, but it is reduced every second down to 50% of your original health
  
• Together Forever: Your currently equipped weapon gains 10 weapon levels but cannot be swapped for a new weapon later
  
• Inseparable: Your currently equipped weapon gains random (Rare+) mods in all empty slots but cannot be dropped or swapped for a new weapon later
  

Both greed perks and totems can be found occasionally in shops and temples, maybe saving a run... or dooming it?



Challenge runs (not to be confused with regular challenges) are Survival runs with a specific condition, loadout or world modifier applied to make the run difficult or unusual. The goal is always to simply complete the base Survival loop (3 biomes) with the challenge active. Completing each challenge run rewards the player with cosmetic unlocks and are a fun way to jump into a Survival run with a specific goal in mind.

Some examples of challenge runs currently added:

• Complete a run while keeping a friendly wandering penguin safe throughout
  
• Complete a run where ALL mods and perks you find are chaos themed (leading to an increasingly unstable run as most chaos related loot increases damage but makes projectiles wildly fly around)
  
• Complete a run with ALL greed perks active at once
  
• Complete a run where the instagib world modifier (enemies die in one hit but so do you) is always active
  
• Complete a run where enemies have less health but 4x as many spawn
  
• Complete a run in 30 minutes but time moves faster after each completed island
  
• Complete a run facing enemies from all biomes who are using random weapons
  
• Complete a run where only greed loot spawns
  

There will be many more challenge runs added to the game over time and they will also feature bronze, silver, gold and diamond medals for completing them with a certain score (score is calculated from damage dealt, damage taken, time taken and crystals remaining when finishing the run).

• Movement Speed Changes: Movement speed has been lowered for Survival mode and increased for Racing mode (though it's still possible to get incredibly fast with perks when on a Survival run)
  
• Grenade Weapon Mod Compatibility: Any weapon mods can now be placed in grenade slots, allowing them to synergize with your current build!
  
  In this example, the grenade has a Split Shot mod which splits a single projectile into multiple smaller ones shortly after being spawned.
  
• Enemies Using Mods: As mentioned previously, enemies will begin getting weapon mods after the first loop in Survival. This means that existing encounters constantly get spiced up.
  
• Weapon Choice: Because of the new weapon leveling system, players will no longer always start with a basic pistol and will instead get a choice of 3 random level 1 weapons when starting each run.
  
• Multiplayer Improvements: I've made some huge changes to ensure that players with high latency still have an experience as close as possible to playing offline (big improvements to movement, hit detection and more).
  

Thanks for reading!



Join the Crab Champions Discord server: https://discord.gg/crabchampions
Follow Crab Champions on Twitter: https://twitter.com/crabchampions
Join the Crab Champions subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/CrabChampions/

In Survival mode, when players choose to continue past the "final" boss, they enter the end game loop where they will return to old biomes with stronger enemies and also encounter new, exotic biomes. The triangle biome is the first of these to be added: a mysterious place where triangles are sacred!



Unique themed loot drops in every exotic biome including weapons and weapon mods!



As with all new biomes, triangle biome themed Racing and Duel maps will be added to the lineup of maps in the game.







Previously, weapons were either hitscan based (shots instantly hit targets in a straight line when fired) or projectile based (shots have a lifetime and can move with various forces like gravity). This led to a confusing split in weapon mods: some were hitscan only, some were projectile only.

Since I wanted a unified weapon mod system (where any mod could be placed on any kind of weapon, including grenades), all weapons were converted to be projectile based. With a bunch of tweaks and a completely rewritten projectile movement system, this approach actually ended up working nicely, and I was able to add a lot of new weapon mods that directly affect the movement characteristics of projectiles. This new system coupled with matching FX for each mod (projectile trails, sparks and more to help distinguish which mods are active) turned out to create some interesting results.



Since there are thousands of meaningful combinations of weapon mods and projectile types, I stumbled onto interesting and powerful synergies that had previously been unseen. This is exactly what I was hoping for when creating the weapon mod system: to let players mix and match different mods to create unique, surprising and overpowered versions of the core weapon archetypes.



Over 50 new weapon mods have been added this month, some reworked from older versions and others from the long list of ideas to add. Some examples:

• Glue Shot: Shots stick to enemies with a delayed explosion
  
• Chaotic Shot: Shots fly in a chaotic pattern but deal increased damage
  
• Homing Shot: Shots home towards nearby enemies
  
• Piercing Shot: Shots can pierce through (and damage) enemies multiple times without exploding
  
• Growing Shot: Shots get larger and deal more damage over time
  
• Wide Shot: Shots are wider horizontally
  
• Damage Aura: Shots have an AOE damage bubble around them
  

You can probably imagine some combinations that'd work well together from those examples already. The fun part is that the same combination of mods will look very different on each base weapon type (like the Claw Shotgun or the Coconut Launcher) so there's some strategy to work out what mix of mods will best suit your currently equipped weapon.



Some mods now have cooldowns as they are too powerful to be triggered every time a shot is fired. Cooldowns are most often seen on mods that are triggered when a shot "explodes" after hitting a surface or enemy as they usually have very powerful effects.

Some examples of mods with cooldowns:

• Spinning Blade: Shots spawn spinning blades that damage nearby enemies
  
• Shockwave: Shots spawn shockwaves that knock back nearby enemies
  
• Black Hole: Shots spawn black holes that suck nearby enemies in
  
• Scatter Shot: Shots multiply in the air and scatter into smaller shots
  
• Spikes: Shots spawn spikes when hitting surfaces
  
• Bombs: Shots spawn a bunch of rolling bombs when hitting surfaces
  

In addition to this, a bunch of new firing patterns have been added for weapons to fire in more interesting ways rather than just straight forward. Weapons can now fire groups of projectiles in many shapes such as arcs, circles, lines, triangles etc.





Enemies now explode into tiny crystal shards when eliminated. These examples are a bit over the top but it's fun to push the explosiveness of the effect to the max!





I had never been fully happy with the gameplay loop in Duel mode: it felt a bit too basic and standard, a typical round based duel with no real interesting mechanics other than "you are a crab!".

With all of the weapon mod changes mentioned above (and the huge chunk of time it takes to properly implement and test each mod), a big change was made to the codebase to allow for weapon mods in Duel mode. With that, the rules have been changed to make the mode much more unique.

At the start of the first round, all players pick a weapon out of a random selection of 3 (all players get the same random selection).



At the start of all future rounds, players are offered a weapon mod out of a random selection of 3. This means that as the match goes on, players will become more and more powerful with a growing list of mods affecting each shot that they fire.

The losing players of each round will have their health doubled.

The players that reach the score limit first win the match!

In my early tests, this has created a much more dynamic and varied Duel experience, with no two matches turning out the same way. Players might make similar choices leading to a close fight, or completely different choices leading to chaotic battles being won or lost in sometimes unbelievable ways!

• Tony's Evil Brother: Word has it that Tony's evil brother has stolen some of his goods and is selling them at discounted rates!
  
• Survival Enemies Using Weapons With Mods: Thanks to the codebase changes mentioned above, Survival enemies can now make use of weapon mods: this is the perfect way to spice up late game enemies with unpredictable combinations of mods on weapons that they usually fire (stay clear of enemies firing chaotic shotguns!).
  
• Movement Speed And Scale Tweaks The world has been scaled down with enemy size and speed also tweaked to match: teammates are now much more visible and this also makes Duel matches more fair as it's much easier to target enemies.
  
• Hazards: Hazards now have a small chance to spawn on any Survival map, adding chaos for both you and enemies!
  
  
  
  
• Resolution Quality Setting Added: This allows players to improve performance issues by lowering the quality of the game resolution. It also can be raised up to 200% for those that want it.
  
• Target Dummies: Target dummies have been added to all shops in Survival mode for players to easily test out new build options.
  

As the weapon mod system is probably the biggest part of the game in terms of replay value and fun, I explored many different ideas before locking down the current system for the beta release. One of these ideas was a completely modular weapon system which allowed players to mix and match various parts to build unique and interesting weapons. Players would always start with the same basic pistol but build up to a much more powerful modular weapon as the run went on. While this idea sounded great on paper, when I implemented the prototype it ended up with a few shortcomings that ended up feeling worse than what I had before, mainly that it's not fun to find weapon parts that all look similar and then have to (sometimes tediously) put them together in a game that is mainly about fast paced action.

There are some things I'd love to explore more from this idea but it's more important to get this beta out, so that takes priority for now.

Thanks for reading!



Join the Crab Champions Discord server: https://discord.gg/crabchampions
Follow Crab Champions on Twitter: https://twitter.com/crabchampions
Join the Crab Champions subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/CrabChampions/

Work continues on every aspect of the game this month: I'm playtesting daily and making thousands of small changes that are adding up to create a satisfying game loop.



I'm very pleased to announce that Crab Champions has received a MegaGrant from the amazing folks at Epic Games (creators of Unreal Engine which I use to make this game). Huge thanks to them for their generosity, I'm beyond grateful for the support! Their MegaGrant initiative is helping devs finish their projects everywhere: if you are making a project in Unreal Engine it's definitely worth checking out.


Since ammo is unlimited in Crab Champions, having a reload mechanic was a bit redundant and uses up a keybind for very little value in return. I've decided to move to a new heat based mechanic to replace traditional reloading. Before you raise your pitchforks: this will not result in your weapon doing a frustrating overheat or jammed animation where you can't fire for several seconds. Instead this heat mechanic factors deeply into the mod system as mentioned below, making it so that stacking high cost mods will mean your weapon heats quickly and will require special cooling mods or perks to circumvent, adding a new layer of strategy to builds.

This prevents any one weapon from creating a meta (this would have been the minigun in previous versions of the game as it had a huge clip, fast fire rate and no penalty for stacking the most powerful mods). Anyone not using the minigun was at a disadvantage. Now, each weapon has a different cooling speed and max heat stat, allowing for much more balance across the weapon types in this regard.





In Development Update #9, I shared the list of perks that were added to the game and mentioned that they would compliment the new weapon mod system. I'm happy to say that a huge amount of progress has been made on this system and it's feeling great. There was a lot of hidden complexity in getting this stable as some of the combinations can produce crazy results!

As a quick recap: weapon mods are a core focus for Survival mode, allowing players to stack powerful upgrades on stock weapons with a near infinite number of combinations. Mods can be placed on your primary and secondary weapons as well as your grenade.

These mods tie into the heat system mentioned above: each mod has a heat cost when triggered which means that players must strike a balance between raw power and being able to fire fast enough to eliminate enemies. Sure it's possible to fire a shot that spawns 12 burning blades which each spawn a black hole when exploding but it'll cost a lot of heat, meaning you won't be able to fire again until your weapon cools enough to afford the heat of another shot.

Here are some of the weapon mods added this month (many more are planned for future updates):

[h2]Common Weapon Mods[/h2]

• Cooling Shot: Shots that hit enemies cool your weapon
  
• Light Shot: Projectiles are no longer affected by gravity
  
• Bouncing Orb: Chance to fire a bouncing orb along with your normal shot
  
• Heatsink: Cooling speed increased
  
• Extended Mag: Max heat increased
  
• Wind Up: Damage increased for each shot fired in a row (resets when overheating or stopping fire)
  
• High Caliber: Damage greatly increased but max heat is reduced to 33%
  
• Iron Sights: Damage increased when aiming
  
• Glue Shot: Shots slow enemies
  
• Charm Shot: Shots charm enemies (they will temporarily fight for you)
  
• Ricochet Shot: Shots ricochet off surfaces
  
• Snake Shot: Projectiles move in a wavy pattern
  
• Fast Shot: Projectiles fly faster
  

[h2]Rare Weapon Mods[/h2]

• Stun Shot: Shots stun enemies
  
• Weak Shot: Shots weaken enemies, causing them to deal less damage
  
• FMJ: Damage increased to shots dealing more than 85 damage
  
• Cluster Shot: Fires an inaccurate cluster of 2-8 shots
  
• Chaotic Shot: Projectiles deal much higher damage but fly in random patterns
  
• Big Shot: Projectiles are larger (both in terms of visuals and hitbox)
  
• Explosive Core: Projectiles have a larger explosion radius
  
• Ghost Shot: Chance to not heat the weapon when firing a shot
  
• Poison Dagger: Chance for enemies to get hit with poisoned daggers when being damaged by this weapon
  
• Iron Shot: Projectiles are far slower and heavier but deal much greater damage
  
• Combo Counter: Deal bonus damage when hitting the same enemy multiple times in a row (resets when missing or hitting another enemy)
  
• Precision Laser: Damage increased for each shot you hit without missing
  
• Earthquake Shot: Shots knock enemies back
  
• Close Shot: Large damage increase when hitting nearby enemies
  
• Distant Shot: Large damage increase when hitting distant enemies
  
• Afterburner: Every fifth shot is a guaranteed crit
  
• Mace Ball: Chance to fire a heavy but damaging mace ball along with your normal shot
  

[h2]Epic Weapon Mods[/h2]

• Damage Shot: Damage greatly increased
  
• Crit Shot: Chance to crit
  
• Power Shot: Crit damage increased
  
• Mega Crit Shot: Chance to megacrit (3x crit) when landing crits
  
• Giga Crit Shot: Chance to gigacrit (10x crit) if all other mods on the weapon are crit based
  
• Supercharger: Fire rate increased
  
• Stacker: Elemental damage stacks increased
  
• Heatseeker: Shots that hit enemies spawn additional shots that fire at nearby enemies
  
• Quad Shot: Fire 4 shots with reduced damage and increased spread
  
• Looper: Projectiles have a chance to explode multiple times
  
• Random Shot: Every time a shot is fired, a random projectile is used
  
• Piercing Shot: Bullets pierce through enemies
  
• Saw Blade: Chance to fire a sharp saw blade along with your normal shot
  
• Elemental Shot: Shots have a random elemental damage type
  
• Crystal Blast: Chance to fire a close range AOE blast with each shot
  

[h2]Legendary Weapon Mods[/h2]

• Double Barrel: Shoot an extra shot each time you fire
  
• Splash Shot: Shots deal splash damage to a radius around their impact point
  
• Black Hole: Chance for a black hole to spawn at the impact point of each shot, sucking nearby enemies and projectiles in
  
• Blade Cluster: Chance for a cluster of blades to spawn at the impact point of each shot
  
• Homing Shot: Chance for projectiles to home to nearby enemies
  
• Ice Shot: Chance for shots to freeze enemies
  
• Fire Shot: Chance for shots to burn enemies
  
• Lightning Shot: Chance for shots to shock enemies
  
• Acid Shot: Chance for shots to poison enemies
  
• Clone Shot: Chance for projectiles to duplicate while in the air
  
• Fireball: Chance to fire a fireball along with your normal shot
  

To make the divide between weapon mods and perks more clear: weapon mods now only affect what comes out of a weapon when fired and perks can handle any other cases. Some mods have been converted to perks such as Exploding Enemies (enemies explode when eliminated) or Icebreaker (enemies take damage when thawing from ice). This allows for many more mod and perk synergies, making perks more interesting and viable rather than being purely for utility. There'll be more work done to make sure that the mod system feels easy to learn while still allowing some crazy combinations.

Here's a fun quick example: the grenade has a Black Hole mod which creates a black hole when exploding. All nearby enemies and projectiles are sucked into it. In the clip below I'm firing an orb launcher with a mod that spawns blades when exploding. You can see them being sucked into the black hole until it runs out and then the homing mod kicks in and sends all of the projectiles to the nearest enemy.




New challenge modifiers have been added to challenge islands this month, increasing the amount of potential variation across runs.

• Army Of One: All enemies are of one random type
  
• Afterlife: Enemies are invulnerable for 5 seconds after being eliminated
  
• Friendly Fire: You can damage yourself with projectiles and explosions
  
• Shrapnel: Enemies explode into a burst of projectiles when eliminated
  
• Rebirth: Enemies spawn a random lesser enemy when eliminated
  
• Ocean Of Lava: The ocean is made of lava: watch out!
  
• Trapped: All traps and hazards on the island are enabled!
  
• Homing Enemies: All enemies have homing projectiles
  
• Double Edged Sword: All explosions do far more damage in a far larger radius
  
• Randomized Mods: All weapon mods are randomized for this island
  
• Sharpshooter: Missing shots causes you to take a small amount of damage
  
• Elemental Enemies: Enemies explode into a random elemental damage area when eliminated
  

These are in addition to the challenge modifiers mentioned in a previous update such as Low Gravity or Instagib.



I've been doing a lot of playtesting on controller and noticed that aim assist was badly needed. I've added two settings that players using controllers can use: a Low setting that simply lowers sensitivity when near a target and a High setting that offers a subtle magnetic pull when aiming near enemies. Players can of course play without any aim assist if they wish. In Duel mode, only the Low setting will be applied for fairness.

• New Icons: Placeholder icons are starting to get replaced: I'm going for a nice clean and simple style with these icons: aiming for them to be easy to read no matter the size on screen!
  
  
  
  
• Horde + Wave Island Types Consolidated: As I want each portal type to offer a meaningfully different style of gameplay, I am merging the Horde and Wave island types as they were too similar. A similar experience to the old Horde islands can still be found when on a challenge island with the Army Of One challenge modifier active.
  
• Pacing: Previously, all portal types had the potential to spawn after finishing the first island which meant that an underpowered player could take on an elite challenge which of course ended up feeling unfair. It also meant that it was possible to get very overpowered early on if you only chose hard portals and got Epic or Legendary rewards. I have done a lot of work to balance this out with the harder portal types slowly trickling in as you progress through each biome. The current layout is:
  Island 1: Horde (1 wave)
  Island 2: Horde (2 waves) OR Defense
  Island 3: Horde (3 waves) OR Defense OR Challenge
  Island 4: Shop
  Island 5-8: Defense OR Challenge OR Elite
  Island 9: Shop
  Island 10: Boss
  
• Respawn Tweaks: Downed players now respawn with only 33% health to prevent downing on purpose to regain health.
  

Thanks for reading!

Join the Crab Champions Discord server: https://discord.gg/crabchampions
Follow Crab Champions on Twitter: https://twitter.com/crabchampions
Join the Crab Champions subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/CrabChampions/