The demo version of the game is going to shut down by end of day March 16th.

My reasonings are: Generally, when both the full release and the demo of a game are available, the demo is expected to look and feel exactly like the full game (though with limited features, we don’t want to be giving the game away for free!)

However, the current demo of Solar War is missing some key QOL features that are going to ship in the full release, so it is not an accurate representation of the full game. So, I’m going to make the demo unavailable right before I make the full game available.

If you’ve already downloaded the demo, you should still be able to play it. If you’re seeing this and still want to download the demo before it goes offline, now’s your chance!

If you’ve missed the demo, don’t worry! The period between the demo going offline and the full release of the game should be very short (less than a day), so the full game will be available for purchase very shortly, if not now.

I’m going to use the remainder of this post to advertise all of the cool things that are coming to Solar War v1.0.

You already know about the one and only Sol. But now, there are 2 new solar systems that you can attempt to conquer!

• Alphy Centauri may appear to be a hospitable binary star system, but the system is actually riddled with annoyances that are sure to ruin your day.
  
• Epsilloni comes with only 5 main sequence planets… along with 50 moons that those planets will release.

You can fight the solar systems individually, or you can fight all of them in the new-fangled Tour Mode, that allows you to hop from system to system!

We’ve completely reworked the difficulty system.

In the demo, there were 4 difficulty options: Relaxed, Standard, Challenge, and Insane Mode. When one was selected, it would set a bunch of variables that control things like how fast planets spawn, how often powerups spawn, what spawns during bosses, etc.

Now, you can adjust each of these variables individually. For instance, you may want a high recovery rate, but with 7x planet spawn rate. That option was simply not available in the demo, but it is now!

The 4 game modes that were found in the demo can now be considered as “presets”, where selecting one will still set all of the variables, but will still allow you to tweak said variables as needed.

Instead of keeping separate high scores for each difficulty, the game now adjusts your score through a “score multiplier” (Calculated by advanced witchcraft!) at the end of a run. This means short runs on harder games can now compete with long runs on easier games!

Something brand new coming to Solar War v1.0 is the upgrade system.

Simply put, the upgrade system is a way to allow players to upgrade The Earth… in the middle of a run.

Players would do this by entering an upgrade store and spending space rocks acquired from defeating planets on various upgrades (or throwing them to bonus points.)

These space rocks can be found in almost every planet, though planets that are harder to defeat tend to have more of them.

Defeating bosses, however, will allow the player to acquire a free upgrade. If used "properly", these upgrades can allow The Earth to become overpowered!

Unspent space rocks are converted to points automatically at the end of a run.

The demo version had 4 Fun Options. This version has 8 Fun Options.

We can guarantee you that these new Fun Options are, well, fun. We will say nothing more about them, though.

I mentioned earlier the QOL features, those essentially fall here.

There are a lot of these features, one of which includes the Play Again button, which allows players to start new runs immediately.

There are also balancing fixes. We saw that Golden Health is a bit too overpowered; although its health is still the same, the recovery is now lower and no longer will auto-using Needy Health powerups save it. On the flipside, we saw that Lazer was too hard to aim, we reworked it such that it is now simple to aim.

The full list is too long to include here. But know that I’ve been hard at work!

Greetings, Earth dweller! You and your other fellows may be living your ordinary lives on this lump of rock, but little do you know, your planet BECAME ONE WITH JUPITER!!!

But oh, don’t worry about that! As your planet engages in a dance of death that it is most certainly bound to lose, immerse yourself instead in the new arcade game Solar War, and all of the features that it has to offer!

Solar War is releasing on March 17th.

I teased in the trailer that I was aiming for March 21st; however, that was still my “best guess” based on how everything was going. For once, things actually went faster than anticipated (they usually go slower), so I’m bumping it up to March 17th. Since this is in the middle of the Spring Sale, there will be a discount on launch as well. It is a mere coincidence that this release just so happens to be in the middle of a seasonal sale. I definitely didn't actually aim for it!

The demo will shut down around that time as well… for reasons that will be mentioned in another post, coming soon.

Perhaps it’s because all of the players in the demo kept becoming one with Jupiter, and I wanted to break that curse?

I mentioned in Development Blog #1 nearly 10 months ago about something called an “Upgrade Store”. Well, it works exactly how you think it does… it upgrades The Earth!

I changed the interface since I first mentioned it. I was originally going for a graphical interface, but as it turns out, I suck at making graphical interfaces. So I made a text-based interface instead, something I suck *less* at.

I think I did a pretty good job!

Anyhow, in order to buy things, you have to collect something called a “Space Rock”. They can be obtained by defeating planets, or, if you’re lucky, you’ll get a powerup that happens to give a bunch of them.

Note that these upgrades are long-term investments! If you’re really in a bind, then no amount of upgrades will prevent you from… becoming one with Jupiter.

And don’t even think about lowering your stats just to upgrade them right back up! The higher the score multiplier, the higher the prices!!!

Also, if you defeat a boss, then you’ll get a free upgrade! Isn’t that awesome? I definitely think so.

We all get it. You were playing a really good run, only for it to be cut short by… becoming one with Jupiter.

And now that you think about it, that was actually a really terrible run! Only 48 seconds? Geez.

So of course, you want to play again. But in order to do that, you have to go through a bunch of screens in order to just start a new run.

These screens are there so that you can change difficulty options, fun options, and which solar system you’re in! But most of the time, you just want to stay put, with the same difficulty, and with no change in fun options!

So, in the score summary screen, there is a new button… the Play Again button.

When that button is pressed, you’ll be shunted back to the start of a new run. No fuss required! (No *more* clicking, either.) The same settings will be kept, because they were designed to be kept between game sessions, anyways.

Originally, I wanted that button to do something cooler: Everything would explode, everything would be reset, and a new Earth would be spawned and play would continue.

But there was a slight problem. Actually, a few of them. And those problems weren’t really “slight” in the first place…

Firstly, my game engine wasn’t actually designed to “reset”. Sure, I could explode every planet, but I’d still have to store every variable that was set at the start, because some of these difficulty variables would be changed in longer sessions.

Then I had to worry about edge cases. What if there’s a boss? For that matter, a sun boss, which couldn’t be reset so easily? Sure, I could set a flag for a couple of minutes until it went away, but there was a fun option that could make it spawn immediately at the beginning of a new run. And then there could be the case where…

All in all, rather than try to implement a system that would be riddled with bugs, some of which I would almost certainly miss, I implemented the lot simpler system that is guaranteed to be free of bugs. And people like this system! Well, I like it, at least.

With these two features, we are brought to the end of this development blog. And… this is the last development blog before full release.

You will see me again. There are still some features that I want to add, but these past few weeks I was focusing on polishing in order to make the game shine; trying to cram these features in at the last minute would have been irresponsible and probably would have resulted in a delay in the release…

Anyhow, with the release of this game coming very soon, now is the best time to follow the game and to put it on your wishlist. But you’d better do it quick, before the planet that you’re living on… becomes one with Jupiter.

Until next time!

-Andrew