Hey guys, It's been a long time coming, but today I'm releasing the next content expansion for Cube Defender. This expansion includes a new game mode, new enemies, new levels, updated balancing and overall tweaks the game to make it more enjoyable.

The release for Windows should be live now, with the Mac release coming very soon.

This update opens up a new game mode called Challenge Mode

As it's name implies, this mode is a challenge. You'll face off against wave after wave enemies as the game expands. You'll play through 30 levels, each getting progressively more difficult.

How It Works
Challenge Mode shares similarities to the other game modes, but instead of playing through multiple rounds (standard mode) or forever until you die (endless mode), in challenge mode you have to complete 30 level expansions back to back.

Turret Management
Much like Endless Mode where you have to maintain your turrets energy to keep them working effectively, in this mode you'll have to be aware of their health.

New enemies will spawn throughout the game that can deal damage to your turrets. Your turrets wont regenerate over time so it's up to you to either repair them or replace them entirely to keep your defences in tact.

Turret Unlocks
Unlike previous modes where you purchase access to new turrets, in this mode you'll unlock them as you play. You'll need to use the basic turrets, along with good placement and correct upgrade timing to survive.

Dynamic Wave Spawners
As you play Challenge Mode and the game ramps up, additional wave spawners will appear in previous zones of the map.

These spawn points have a chance to appear at the end of each level, becoming more and more frequent as the game plays on. If you look at the image above, a spawner appears in the top left section of the map which is unguarded by any turrets.

You'll get a warning message when one appears, but you'll have to find where on your map this spawner has appeared and build your defences accordingly. This should keep you continually thinking about your defences as a whole (not just the most recently expanded section)

Steam Achievements
New achievements have been added to Challenge Mode. These unlock as you play endless mode, corresponding to levels 10/20/30.

Exclusive to Challenge Mode are the new Attack Cubes. These enemies spawn in later levels and can be devastating to your defences. These cubes attack all turrets along their path and can spawn in large groups.

As your turrets take damage from these cubes you'll need to repair them or replace them entirely. While not entirely difficult by themselves, when they are left unchecked can cause defences in your previous zones to fail.

The intention with these guys is to give you a reason to watch previous sections of the map and introduce a new element of repair and replacement.


To keep things interesting, I've added 12 new level varieties to the game.

These levels are a combination of easy and moderate difficulty, most having only 1 or two 2 initial spawn points in them. As the game gets polished further, additional levels will be added to increase variety.

While playing any of the game modes, you will now have access to a new quick actions menu on the right hand side (as seen below in challenge mode)

These give you quick access to perform certain functions. These actions are dependent on what game mode you're currently in. Here are some examples:

• Restore all turrets energy (endless mode)
  
• Restore all turrets health (challenge mode)
  
• Upgrade all active turrets (multiple modes)

There's a premium to pay for this convenience as upgrading your turrets / energy / health this way is more expensive than doing it manually (and will restore health / energy to turrets even if they are in almost perfect condition).


Right Click Turret Upgrade
To make managing your turrets even easier, you can now right click on them to instantly upgrade them to the next level. This should save you having to manually open up the upgrading UI just to select the new turret upgrade.

Middle Mouse Movement
Something I've wanted to add in for a while, middle mouse pan movement. Holding down the middle mouse button will let you pan across the map.

Performance Improvements - Bars & UI
Everything that's rendered on the screen costs CPU/GPU time to calculate and even something minor like health/energy/armour bars can cause a noticeable impact on performance when there are hundreds of elements in play (especially when there are shadows involved)

In an attempt to limit the slowdown of rendering these items, as soon as you zoom out of the game map, these UI elements are hidden. This will give you an easier overview of what's happening across several sections of the map and also increase performance.

Performance Improvements - Scaling
Both Endless Mode and Challenge Mode have unique performance considerations compared to the original Standard Mode. Unlike in Standard Mode, where there could only be a few levels played in each game round (with a few dozen enemies and turrets). In these extended modes you could be feasibly be fighting off hundreds of enemies across 30+ levels.

As part of this update I've adjusted game logic, rendering and other functionality to improve framerates when playing on massive games. This should keep frames reasonable up until 30 levels, with slight drops each level after. These performance changes should also improve the Standard Mode also.

Additional changes and adjustments

• The update resolves a long outstanding bug with the level expansion system. Beforehand, the direction in which to expand in is determined at the end of the current level, this means that if you're unlucky, the path could end up folding in on itself ( expand right, up, left and then down) causing a collision. With this update, the entire level generation process is determines as soon as the game loads, ensuring that as the game plays out
  
• Fixed bug with large maps. Previously as maps expanded the "background" image would no longer tile. This update makes it significantly bigger so visually it should look fine on large maps
  
• Endless mode now show's the correct number of levels completed.
  
• Turrets in Endless Mode will slowly regenerate energy over time. This energy regen will top up the turret to it's current maximum power level. This means that if a turret is on level 1 charge (1 of 3), it can regenerate up to the maximum allowed for the first charge level
  
• Several UI changes to animation speed, movement and pacing.
  
• New animation while hovering over turrets (to show it's selected)
  
• Bug-fixes with endless mode achievements (incorrect triggering)

I'm in the progress of working out ideas and adjustments to Cube Defender going forward. A majority of the game modes and features I originally wanted to provide exist now. I'm happy to hear feedback and look forward to improving the game further :)

Hey everyone

Just a quick update to outline what's coming up next for Cube Defender.

I'm continuing to tweak the game, improving how it plays and overall making it feel fairer and more balanced. The next content update (which is planned for July) will contain updates to the following:

• Sound Overhaul: Currently the game sounds are all in 2D, meaning you hear turrets firing from across the map. In the next update most non UI sound will be switched to 3D sounds so you only hear them when applicable.
  
• Additional Level Combinations: Additional level combinations to bring in new variety to the gameplay. The end goal is to make these levels scale even better so that at the start of the game you'll face levels with 1 wave spawner, but in later levels you'll face several
  
• New Achievements / Stats: Additional achievements are in the works. These will most likely be non standard ones, e.g upgrading X items in X seconds (edge cases)
  
• Linux Support: I've been testing out the Linux port and it seems to run stably so with the next release I'll officially be supporting Linux.
  
• Game Saves: Right now there's no real game state to store your high scores and other user data (achievements are on Steam's side and local high scores haven't been a focus). With the next update I'm looking to sync data through steam so that if you uninstall the game your scores (and later on more complex data) will persist.

I also have a few thoughts on doing the following:

• Adding in additional changes to Endless Mode (providing a way for the enemies to fight back against the turrets so you have to keep repairing)
  
• Additional new background music tracks. This will be dependent on what music I can create or find to suit the game
  
• Additional UI tweaks and further adjustments

Thanks for the support guys. I'm keen to keep updating this game until it reaches a really solid foundation I can be proud of.

For any feedback please feel free to leave a comment or PM here on here.

Cheers