I am really happy to announce that version 0.3.0 is live...Woot!

Thanks everyone that helped me play test this release!

Despite the amount of play testing there may be other issues with the release so please let me know as soon as you find an issue so I can address it immediately.

What Worked

I'm actually beginning to fall into a rhythm. It took a bit longer than I expected to get this release out. I have been searching for a full-time job in between working on this game and a couple other projects. There was also the Ludumdare event this past weekend that took time out of my schedule. 

So I have finished polishing off the last items in the main game progression model. You will not receive a random new ship part after completely clearing and hyper jumping to the next planet. This area needs polishing for sure so I plan on doing that with patch versions. I will hold off on introducing major gameplay changes but instead try to focus on graphics, ui, and minor gameplay enhancements. Like enhancing the planet missions selection screen, ship build screen. All in preparation for the next major gameplay release.

Shields work but I think they need some tweaking. Especially since I feel they're over powered atm. The toggling of the shields is a bit insensitive and of course confusing if you are using a mouse to play since it's bound to the '/' key.

New Parts

• Targeting Blaster - so this is the first of hopefully many new parts I'm going to add. It is a weapon that tracks to an enemy ship part. And right now it tries to lead the target by a bit. So pretty dumb targeting and isn't 100% accurate, but has the same firing rate as your other blasters so it is very capable. And I will most likely be changing it in a patch version.

Power to the Engines

So for this new version. If you get engines as your first random part consider yourself lucky, because they boost your ships overall speed. The speed of a single engine is pretty low. And I feel that it might be slightly too low but will have to tweak that and see how it plays. I think the amount that each new engine adds to your speed is about right for the amount of space available and the risk or an explosion.

What didn't

Not a lot went wrong. Although changing how the vector2d class actually works turns out to have unforeseen ripple effects in other parts of the game. There were definitely some drawbacks to how the UI widgets are getting updated and I will need to work on figuring out why they are not as responsive as they should be. Should be a quickly upcoming patch version for that and other types of wonky little issues.

I think not having the death penalty or stronger enemies with solid advantages will ultimately prove the games undoing as your progress to getting all the ship parts and building a powerful vessel that makes insanely light work of it's enemies.

Also, I have known for a long time that the games visuals are probably it's biggest downfall. I'll admit some stubbornness to actually putting forth more effort in that department. I think though that my vision of the games graphical style is still developing and I will have to try some different things out and see if they fit before updating them. Just know that I am almost certainly going to update them, I have to if I am going to get more people to play this game.

Finally words.

 Seriously thanks for reading and keeping up with the game development. Or finding the game interesting enough to read whats going on. I appreciate any support in advance. I hope you will download the game, or try the update and leave some feedback or even ideas of your own, if you feel so inspired.

If you already have the game and want to reset so you can see how the game builds up over time, simply install on a new device or wipe out the Love2D game files directory ~/.local/share/love/amber on linux and %USER_HOME%\AppData\Roaming\LOVE\amber on windows I believe. You can consult the Love2D docs for a more comprehensive list. Love2D Filesystem Docs.