Welcome back to the StarAir! We’ve made quite a few changes since the last time we showed off the game, so let’s get right into it!

DAMAGE NUMBERS

No Action-RPG would be complete without damage numbers! A small, but subtle addition to the game! It’s not the most ideal method but what we did was set up a global variable that would account for the last damage recorded and display that as text in a new object that pops near the damaged character! If these numbers don’t fancy you, we do plan on allowing you to disable them in both the final version of the game and StarAir -Stage Diagnostics-.

COMBOS?!?!

Who doesn’t love having a combo meter in any game?!?! In StarAir, combos activate when you achieve kills and you have to quickly rack up kills to keep your meter going! Landing hits on enemies will increase the meter (at the moment however, not so much due to a minor bug that’ll be fixed) and cutscenes will pause the combo meter so you can keep the action going for as long as possible! For every amount of kills you get, your rank will increase starting from D to SSS (yes, I know). Reaching SSS rank gives you a XP boost, so you want to see about racking up combos for as long as possible! Be careful though, getting hit will severely reduce the meter and can potentially kill your combo!

NEW ABILITIES

Work has began on some of the new abilities you can use with the OS Upgrades Module in StarAir! Let’s take a look at some of them.

CLIP SWAP

After acquiring this skill, there’s a random chance that you’ll hear the sound effect of a gun cocking! If you press the R button shortly after, you’ll activate Clip Swap and your next few shots will deal additional damage, regardless of what weapon you have/swap to (with the exception of ATAR-E, which doesn’t receive any damage benefits or use up the clip swap)!

STARMAGNET

Pick up the StarMagnet to unlock the ability to automatically have gold fly towards you! You can also press F to have cards fly towards you as well, although I’m going to quickly work on fixing it so the cards actually fly towards you (they don’t! This’ll probably be fixed by the time this is posted anyways haha)

DEFINITION BLASTER V2

Max’s default blaster, the DEFINITION BLASTER, gets a upgrade here! It can now shoot bullets from the bottom and you have a chance at receiving ammo for all of your other weapons for every shot you land! I aim on making this upgrade make the default blaster a decent, viable option should the player want to for some reason still use it alongside with the game’s other weapons, so I’ll work on tweaking it so Max’s blaster can be it’s own deadly tool of choice!

NEW SKILL ICONS

Game-Artist Hu-san has completed most of the icons for the game’s skill tree. Have a look! Icons that can’t be purchased are all grayed out.

In addition, the mouse cursor can also be controlled in the skill tree menu if you don’t feel like using your mouse to purchase upgrades! It does causes some minor issues but this is the only major GUI in the game at the moment that’s controlled by this mouse pointer. The sensitivity will be able to be adjusted in the final version of the game.

AMMO COUNTERS

Another quality of life improvement, we’ve added multiple different counters for ammo! Ammo normally displays on the UI area in the right, but it’s still best to have that information right next to the ship! By default, the amount of bullets you have left will only appear when you’re low on ammo with the gun. However, you can set to (currently) 4 different modes! Let’s show two of em!

Here’s the mode where numbers will always show up near the ship counting the amount of shots you have left for a weapon (except for the Def. Blaster, which has infinite ammo!)

Here’s the mode where ammo is counted as a bar, but the bar only appears when you’re low on ammo!

WHAT ELSE?

Our main focus at the moment is making the five remaining skills we’ve yet to programmed and build an improved bullet pattern for enemies! After that, we’ll begin developing the game’s separate mode, Arcade Mode, working on various implementations for allowing updating support, adding cutscene events, and polishing up more of the art! We’ll have some more to show in the next update, but maybe not as much! Who knows? We’ll have to see what happens of course!

-MeltingComet