It's been an intense 2 weeks for us. Lots of work on the content we want to add. Some small changes to the demo. Lots of work involving testing engines and workflows. Here's the details:


We made many small changes to the reload bar both on the player and the crosshair to make them more legible. First, they're bigger. The reload bar has been redrawn to fit its new size, though it's hardly noticeable unless you obsessively compare it with gameplay videos that have been released. Second, the crosshair and cursor both have shadows now to prevent them to mix with background elements. A non-small amount of you guys have missed the reload indication on the crosshair for all of these reasons. Active reloading should be much more pleasant to perform now. We also added an attack indicator in the form of a line to our sword enemy. This should prevent some annoying instadeaths.


Our wonderful Japanese translator advised us to use better fonts for Japanese characters, and even recommended a couple. This prompted us to look for suitably elegant but still hopefully legible fonts for our other non-latin alphabet using languages as well. Our Japanese and Chinese players may notice some issues with inaccurate line breaking here and there. This is an issue we're still looking into to solve without the need to just manually add line breaks everywhere. HOWEVER, the text is hopefully much easier to read now! No more tall lines that shrink text to oblivion.


In preparation for Steam's SHMUPFest, and taking in people's impressions, we've updated the enemy progression of the demo. We've added 2 new enemies and shortened the overall play duration to tighten things up. Lots of little tweaks to enemy stats. This should give a better idea of how the final game progression will be.


We previously announced our willingness to switch engines to avoid financial risks for the future. We did a ton of work seeing what's possible and efficient in Godot, the engine that's been shining along with Unreal Engine these last couple of weeks. To make it short: we decided that it makes more sense to complete the work we started in Unity. Now that we had plenty of opportunities to test workflows especially for the visuals and UI, transferring the game to Godot will take an unforeseen amount of time that may be detrimental to us.

We want to be efficient and not take too much time to deliver a complete product. Not to mention, for all its faults, Unity has immensely powerful particle, UI, sprite setup, animation and tweening systems that we use to their maximum extent. Godot simply doesn't have the benefit of time that Unity had to build all these powerful tools. It is possible that in time, the engine will get more robust especially now that a wave of developers may want to introduce all the things that make 2d development so powerful in Unity. But right now, we don't want to waste time fumbling around when we just released a demo.

Because of that, we decided to just stick with the plan we made for ourselves right after we had first released the demo. This, of course, doesn't change anything for you guys. One way or another, we're still gonna deliver a full game that we hope you'll enjoy blasting through.

• Updated crosshair and reload bar
  
• Updated reload tutorial visual
  
• Added attack indicator to sword enemy
  
• Added custom fonts for non-latin alphabet languages
  
• Minor enemy stat tweaks
  
• New enemy types and progression
  
• Added credits to main menu

• Localised codex text updates correctly
  
• Fixed some sprite ordering issues
  
• Button titles in Settings screen are visible now
  
• Fixed surface to space scene transition visual bug

Dear friends, we don't want to bore you with gamedev industry news, but they will affect the development of Angelstruck, so we want to talk about them.

You may have heard the news about Unity's new taxation rules, and the incredibly bad implications that has for Unity developers. TLDR, after a certain revenue and application installation threshold, developers are planned to be charged *per install*. Not sales, but installs, which includes reinstalls by a player who would've already supported us with a purchase, or the substantial amount of players who install the game through other means. This affects ALL Unity games, even the ones that have been published 10 years ago.

Unity, in a scramble to explain their poorly thought-out plan, stated they'd be using proprietary tracking methods to detect single-user installs. In other words, a method with zero transparency and dubious effectiveness. What this potentially means for data collection on players' end, we have no idea. Nothing's clearly explained. Concerning us, this punishes developers who: 1) plan to make a living out of game development. 2) refuses to sell at a high price to offset the risk of being charged more than we gain.

Here's an article that goes into details, though there are many more out there.[mashable.com]

So what does this mean for Angelstruck? Well, we can't go on with Unity, despite our years of experience with it. The company has shown that they're willing to make dangerous changes with no notice. Even if they backtracked on this legally dubious plan, there's no guarantee that our work is safe from future corporate shenanigans.

Currently, we're working like crazy to transfer our game to the Godot Engine. It is an open source, now battle tested game engine that powers mega-hits like Brotato, Cruelty Squad, Halls of Torment and many more. This engine is completely new for us, with different rules that we have to figure out. It will most likely be impossible to make a 1:1 recreation, especially visually. But we'll work diligently to make the best possible version of the game we can. We'll definitely publish a demo update to receive your feedback.

We want to thank everyone who follows our news, and especially the crazy persons who enjoy our demo enough to play 4+ hours. See you in a while.