UI Enhancements

Lots and lots of refactoring work to make the UI more flexible, the UI was not built well and was basically a ton of work to get even the simplest elements to look and function correctly. It's not entirely done yet but I need to work on something else so I'll fit the rest of it in future releases as I polish it.

The most immediate result you'll notice is the game menu's should be much more usable. They can be used with the mouse and different types of buttons have had their usability significantly improved.

Changes to ship movement

I've been trying to find a way to add a higher skill ceiling to ship movement in some way. Strafing was an attempt at this but it's very very difficult to utilize properly in a 360 top down shooter. One thing I already had in the game was a bit of recoil from weapons, this presents a bit of an opportunity to slow yourself down when you need to as well as some decision making on if you should fire if you are about to be hit by something. Thinking about this lead me to adding the ability to move backwards at a lower speed than you can move forwards. This creates opportunity to fire backwards but at a higher risk of getting hit. It also creates a opportunities to take "pot shots" by turning and firing while quickly switching between forwards and backwards movement.

Game Design

• Removed the "ping" locator from secondary objectives. The constant noise was a huge detractor from the ambiance. What I've done instead of having mini game for finding the objectives is to move them closer to planets so they are easier to naturally find.

• Because you can now fly backwards I've removed some of the harder restrictions of weapon recoil. Weapon recoil can be considerably stronger now.

• Enemies can now gain shields... the two new enemies may or may not heavily feature shields :shrug:.

• Beam Cannon will no longer completely destroy any asteroid with one hit. This aspect made this weapon incredible powerful for both enemies and gathering resources. I don't think that's healthy for game balance, weapons should be really good at specific jobs, some might be really good for gathering resources from asteroids, some maybe good at taking out tightly clumped enemies while others are good against large slow targets and still others good against fast moving targets. You should always feel like there "might" be a better weapon for a specific situation out there. If there's ever a weapon that's so good that once you have it you'll never consider switching it for something else then I will probably consider changing it. But to compensate I've made the Beam Cannon do a little more damage overall.

• Single Laser has slightly lower fire rate. This weapon felt too good at too many roles to be a "starting" weapon. Players should want to discard their starting weapon as soon as they can but players are often keeping it around as cover for other weapon's "weaknesses".

New Content

• Two new enemies.

• A new piercing style weapon

• Planets will occasionally set up their own defenses...

• New music track by Chris that plays when you lose.

Polish

• Moved some sound effects to emitters so they will properly fade based on their position. I'll be slowly doing this with more and more sounds.

• New thrust animation for player ships.

• UI buttons have new design and animations