Hey hello and welcome - We’re back with the first major update!

The clock says we released the alpha 38 days ago. So what did we do with all that precious time? Well, for all you tech heads out there we wrote a detailed patch note. But don’t worry, we put the most important bits at the top.

We have been working tirelessly on Neon. We have a lot of ideas and content that need to be designed, implemented, tested and polished!

Major Changes

• New shapes for the Heroes that now indicate their ability
  • The cooldowns of the abilities are now properly visualized by the circle below the Hero
• We completely reworked the ability switch (both mechanically and audiovisually)
  • Targeting another player now happens via a circle instead of a line
  • Both players have to trigger/accept the ability switch
  • A whole range of new ability swap effects that compliments the new shapes and better visualizes what is going on
• We reworked the way input is processed, so now you can just plug in whatever controller you have (full list of supported controllers can be found here)!
  • Hotswapping controllers during runtime is now supported (though ultimately plugging in controllers only takes effect in the lobby)
  • The lobby now correctly updates when swapping controllers
  • The left and right trigger buttons are now functional for triggering and switching abilities
• All-embracing, universal and pain-staking code clean up
  • You won’t actually notice any of this in the game, but the project was still absolute spaghetti-code from the Global Game Jam 2018. Now was the time to fix it (extensively!), so now we have a clean slate and can continue to work on the project without (hopefully) turning insane (yay! \o/).

You can check out all the changes in our brand new trailer as well!

Minor Changes

Apart from the major reworks there was a lot of internal surgery on the game’s code and mechanics, so that we have a clean and steady base to build upon. Because we have SO MANY ideas for Neon! There’s so much yet to come!

Alright, here’s the extensive list of what we’ve been doing:

• The Boss now gets a random color on every new round
• A.I.s will now swap abilities with the player, when kindly asked to
• Players now respawn, when they managed to leave the arena for any reason
• Slightly adjusted the workings of the Boss A.I. It should now track its target more consistently.
• The credits now show our new team member and the company name (remember, Neon is originally a game jam product from two years ago, a lot has changed since then)
• Adjusted tutorial screens to the new ability mechanics and meshes
• The version number of the build is now displayed in every scene as a watermark
• Also the audio controller in the menu now is logarithmic instead of linear (so yay to the 3 people on earth who know what that means ;) )

Balance Changes

• Increased the intensity of camera shake for orb hits and the Boss nova by 20%
• Increased the damage of the boss attacks from 10 to 18

Bugfixes

• Fixed the orb not always stopping when pausing the game
• Fixed the countdown at round start. It now pauses correctly when pausing the game
• Fixed inconsistencies in music tracks in all levels
• Fixed random jumps from the healthbar during gameplay
• Fixed song title texts not fading correctly on round start
• Fixed the Boss A.I. getting stuck on multiple corners throughout all arenas
• Fixed a bug where the lobby could wrongly start in paused state
• Fixed the game difficulty not scaling correctly over time (for you game designers out there: the points you need to win decrease over time ;))

The Road Further On

The next update will make a switch to a more recent version of Unity. While this may not amount to a noticeable change in the game, it will enable us to do far more stuff from there on out. Currently Neon is build on a version of Unity 2017. The newer versions of Unity however have so many new tools, e.g. the Shader Graph, that give us a huge advantage for further development. 

Apart from that we neatly listed all coming changes for you in our roadmap :) We also adjusted our roadmap to reflect the adjusted development process and will continue to update it when necessary. A lot can happen everyday and plans are crucial but they often change and that’s okay.

We are motivated more than ever and already having so much fun with Neon! And we’re humbly grateful to everyone who has downloaded, played and commented so far! We still highly encourage you to give us your feedback, pretty please :) 

Let us know what you like, what you hate, report all bugs and follow us on social media to actually see how we make the game.