New Weapons, UI work, and fixes.

Hey everyone! This week wassss going to include some of Pom's new chip rewards, but when I went to get started on them I actually found that I just didn't really like a lot of what I had planned. I decided to put it on the back-burner a bit and rethink things. It was a bit of a hiccup, but with that on-hold, I jumped onto some other things I had planned. I'll start from the top!

First thing that was a bit overdue was that I added the new "DANGER" alert UI. There will also likely be a screen "static/distortion" effect to go with this, but for now it will remain simple.

Next up, I did some work on the hub. Gamepad still struggles on a lot of the menuing in this game, so I've made some improvements/fixes to it. In the future I would actually like to create a simplified UI specifically if the player is using gamepad to help with some of the awkward navigation, but that likely won't come until v1.0.

There was some odd sections where gamepad would simply not work in the hub when starting conversations with characters. This should be fixed.

I also made it so "Party Select" now works with gamepad. While at it, I animated the UI in it to make things look a little more smooth.

(By "animated" I simply mean that the panels will actively grow/shrink, and pop a little. Before the transition was just instant). This animation will apply when using a mouse as well.

Another weird thing that I fixed was the D-pad being "Sticky". I basically replaced the whole UI controller, as some of the settings were not optimal when using Unity's default map.

Another small change was adding highlighting to some interactable objects.

Some of these didn't highlight before, which was no big deal on mouse, but made things confusing for gamepad.

Next was something fairly simple: Lana's maid costume.

AbsurdRes hammered it out,

I broke it up, meshed, and rigged it up!

From there we shift away from UI, and get back to gameplay.

NEXT UP! New weapons/loadout options.

First thing, (And the more complicated to implement) is "Missiles"

Missiles:

Missiles will lock onto any enemy in vision of the player (With a limited distance similar to that of MITEs, but with wider range).

These missiles do fairly low damage, but can be incredibly effective in areas with lots of scattered enemies, as it is quite spammable.

This leads into the next big thing I've wanted to address. MITEs, and all auto-targeting abilities(like missiles) have suffered around 3 massive flaws.

1: In certain situations, they target the wrong spot on the boss, or enemies
2: In some boss fights they lack the range to do anything.
3: In some weird situations they straight up, don't realize an enemy is there, and will just sit idle.

All in all, even though I really like these abilities, they are buggy, and I am not happy with their state. Under no circumstances should a weapon render you soft-locked in a fight.

1: I have created a universal fix for this. Before I was fixing each individual scenario this happened, but I decided to add a small algorithm to the core code of the scanners to always move to the collider they detect, not the enemy's position. This means even in cases when things are disjointed, the collider itself will always be the target. This should no longer ever be a problem.

2: I have also created a universal fix for this. I had it so that certain weapons extend in certain boss fights, but I decided to make things easier, I extend the range of all these weapons in every single boss fight. All auto-targeting, Flame wave, etc, should always reach the boss in boss fights now.

3: I have not gotten around to extensive testing on this, but I will find and squish this issue if it is still relevant.

There are still other things I wish to address with MITEs and auto-targeting to ensure things work flawlessly.

---------------------

OK... next. I added a couple more "Thrust/Defense" options:

Pulse:

In place of Barrel Roll, or Blink. Pulse explodes, dealing damage to all nearby enemies and missiles. Great for taking out anything that homes towards the player.

Pulse also has a property that renders the player immune to "Immune lasers". "Immune laser" a property given to lasers like the blue ancient lasers. Basically MOST lasers that you cannot barrel roll, you can dodge with Pulse.

Pulse, however is vulnerable to lasers that you CAN barrel roll.

-------------

Finally, a little more pricey of a "Thrust" option.

Generator:

With the Generator you have NO defensive option. In return, you simply get +50% thrust regeneration.

Perhaps you prefer using the ally's defensive abilities more, or maybe you don't care about defensive options and just want more offensive capabilities, well this will help with that.

----------------

With all of that, the last thing I've done might be pretty significant to some levels. "Contamination" has been changed a bit, and is a lot more threatening.

Instead of cleansing contamination with one barrel roll, each barrel roll only cleanses 1 stack. This means they are quite debilitating to get hit by. This applies to all instances, including Spider Venom on Zol'gan, and Slime in Raptura2.

Because of this, I may see about re balancing the damage, etc.

This might lead you to the question "What if you don't have barrel roll?"

No matter what you pick, pressing your barrel roll button will "Cleanse" a stack. This means Pulse, Blink, and even Generator will still Cleanse a stack.

--------------

Alright! That should cover everything done this week! Next week is going to be focusing a bit more on New Features. Perhaps this time I'll get around to some of the new Pom abilities. Whatever gets done, I'll be sure to report about it Friday! Thanks again everyone!

-Regulus