DEVLOG #14

Three enemies, rebuilt

Each one now has a colour nobody else on the field uses, a silhouette you can read at a glance and a look that tells you what it does.

• Runner. Ash-grey, low to the ground, half on its hands. Yellow-and-black charge canisters on its back, an amber core pulsing in its chest. Same speed, same nerve, finally a body to match.
• Medic. Bone-white plate and turquoise canisters on its back. The lightest thing on the battlefield, on purpose: it is the first thing you should shoot.
• Spotter. Its own unit now, no longer a Sniper in disguise. Sand-coloured kit, radio antenna, kneeling beside a laser designator on a tripod.
• No more flicker. Enemies still face you, but one standing right above or below you no longer flips back and forth.

You can watch it work now

The Medic healed 10 HP per second to everything within 130 pixels. Late in a run, against enemies with thousands of HP, that was nothing, and you could not see it happen anyway.

A turquoise ring on the ground shows its reach. A beam runs from its canisters to every enemy it is healing, with pulses flowing along it, and turquoise sparks rise from whoever is being patched up. What you see is exactly what it does.

Follow the red glint

The barrage needs eyes inside the perimeter. Every few seconds the Spotter's designator flares with a bright red lens glint, and for a moment a thin laser line runs from him to where the next shell lands. Follow the line back and you have found him. The first time you meet one, a NEW HOSTILE note tells you exactly that.

One body, five marks

The Baron always came back: at wave 5, 25, 45, 65 and 85, with more HP and a new signature attack each time. Now you can see it. Every time an operator brings him down, the MORTIS protocol pulls his pattern out of reserve and rebuilds him heavier. Command calls the returns Marks.

• His title follows him onto the intro card, the wave banner, the boss bar and the kill banner. From Mk II an UPGRADED note in the HUD tells you what he learned.
• One bar per Baron. From wave 25 he brings company. The boss bar now splits into a separate health bar for every Baron on the field, with 3 / 4 STANDING on top. The fallen go dark and stay in the row, so the bars never jump around.
• Mk IV and Mk V breathe. The amber lights in their armour pulse, faster on Mk V, harder when he enrages.
• Every volley fires twice, like the bosses: the echo comes a fifth of a second later in purple, bent toward you. His Mk IV spiral is the one exception. It is already a stream, and doubled it put 246 rounds on screen at once.

They fire twice now

The first eight bosses gave you too many quiet moments to stand and shoot. Every volley they fire now comes back a fifth of a second later from wherever they moved, turned toward you. Rings keep their gaps, aimed fans follow you, and each boss's rounds glow in its own colour.

• The quiet windows are closed. Titan, Warlord, Dreadnought, Phantom and Leviathan lost the pauses you could hide in.
• Monarch keeps his distance. He used to glue himself to you and you barely saw him. Now he circles at range and only hunts you in short bursts in phase two and three.
• SOVEREIGN CROWN. His new signature attack: a golden ring charges over 1.4 seconds, then a spinning spiral of golden lances and a nova of orbs. Every 16 seconds at first, every 8 by the end.

Longer, tighter, harder to switch off

• It runs on its own clock: 35 to 75 seconds depending on how deep you are, straight across wave changes. A boss wave still lifts it.
• Less room. The field shrinks from 55% down to 30%, and the creeping barrage pulls it in further, to 24% late in a run.
• One to five Spotters with 420 HP each, dug in at their post from wave 41. Every Spotter down takes 5 seconds off the barrage.
• All of them down means the battery fires blind for 10 seconds, at half rate and without bracketing. Then Command reports new Spotters running in from the edge.

Two things that should never happen

• The operator got stuck at the top of the screen after you clicked a desktop notification or switched to another app. The game measured an invisible window and shrank the battlefield. It now waits until it is visible again, and clears held keys when you come back.
• Neon went flat late in a run. On High Quality the game quietly dropped its effects under heavy load, so a mythic machine gun looked dull from around wave 52. High Quality now keeps every effect and only lowers render resolution if it has to. Storm darkness sits under your rounds instead of over them.