Hey all, Swarmlake 2.14 is out to improve understandability and depth:
- Added arena limit
Increases the required decision making and adds more positioning and meaning to space. It improves the depth tree for both expert and beginner players. For the latter it reduces the amount of invalid options such as running infinitely backwards/forwards or making too big of circles. Since the game gets harder over time this only ever resulted in slower and more frustrating deaths which were not obvious to understand.
- Improved enemy spawning to be independent of player look direction
Less punishment and more freedom of where players look. While this increases uncertainty of where enemies spawn there is still no randomness as it is the same sequence for everyone. Especially players now need to adapt more to reach bomb enemies which makes the game more dynamic.
- Improved avoider (orange) enemy projectile avoidance to be a bigger threat
Makes this enemy more noticeable and reduces situations where player vision is completely blocked by enemies.
- Improved bomb min move height (now can trigger without jumping if pulled down)
Increases discoverability of detonating bombs. If a bomb is not hit by a projectile and therefore possibly pulled down they still require jumping to detonate.
- Fixed jumping off of bombs
- Fixed showing wrong leaderboard avatar in rare cases
- Removed replacing bombs on spawn limit (now pauses spawning at limit)
Encourages more dynamic player movement patterns. In the past players could ignore existing bombs and move in an infinite circle as the farthest bombs would despawn and new ones would keep spawning in front of them.
- Removed score-based fire-rate (now always at max rate)
Increases death consistency as it is tightly linked to fire-rate. This also makes the early game easier.
- Removed doubled enemy spawn scaling after 10,000 score (now as before 10k)
- Reset leaderboard
Please keep in mind that the max highscores will be lower now due to the gameplay changes. Unfortunately the leaderboard also had to be reset.
Congratulations to the top ten players and everyone else who competed the past year:
Swarmlake has continuously evolved over time with the goal to make it more fun for more players. I am aware that people dislike change and I am sorry for the frustration this can cause.
Thank you
- Dominique
