Polychoron 0.0.9 alpha update

This is quite a  big update! After 95 days since the last one, it had better be. Lets start with a fresh alpha gameplay trailer:

There are quite a few visual improvement like more variation in wall textures, increased amount of dynamic lights, new dynamic crosshair and many small HUD improvements.

I added a couple of new weapon power-ups that give you temporary extra fire power: The first one adds one extra base weapon and the second one replaces it with a deadly laser beam.

Enemy behavior has also been tweaked. The laser wielding sentry gun is now hiding behind a shield when it's not shooting, so you'll have to wait until it fires the laser beam and deactivates the shield. Other enemies have had their timings slightly adjusted. Let me know if you feel that some enemy is too hard or easy.

One change in the mobile version is worth mentioning specifically: A separate shoot button. You can still shoot using the double-tap-and-hold gesture but a dedicated button is much more familiar option for most new players. For this reason it's also enabled by default. It can be disabled in the settings.

After all the good news, there are some bad news too. Due to deadline reasons, I had to release the game using Godot Engine 3.2.4 release candidate version. That version has a bug that breaks the web version, so it has not been updated yet. I will put out another maintenance update once a stable engine version is available and gotm.io supports it. For now the web version stuck to alpha 0.0.8.

Here's the full list of changes since the last update:

• Added two new unique wall texture variants to serve as landmarks in levels.
• Added laser beam weapon power-up.
• Added extra blaster weapon power-up.
• Added a shield to laser sentry gun to make it vulnerable only when it's shooting.
• Tweaked laser sentry gun shoot/aim timing to be more consistent.
• Added charge sound to laser sentry gun.
• Added more HUD messages to instruct new players.
• Made damage glitch effect fade out slowly while not taking damage.
• Minor tweaking to red flash effect to better show the direction of damage.
• Limit some ship module power-ups to higher levels only.
• Tweaked all enemies to turn a little faster.
• Added a sound to laser beams powering up.
• Made patrolling enemy type a little bit stronger.
• Made all enemies remember player location longer after losing line of sight.
• Tweaked camera shakes to be slightly shorter but more aggressive.
• Trigger temporary glitch effects on nearby "electric" explosions.
• Moved screenshot saving to a separate thread to prevent frame drops.
• Added one more particle layer to explosions to make them "beefier".
• Improved explosion fragment spawning pattern.
• Show HUD messages when reaching major global high score ranks.
• Added a tip showing required scores for a new global high scores.
• Increased the maximum number of simultaneous dynamic lights.
• Added a separate shoot button to touch screen controls (can be hidden in settings).
• Added noise to materials when using GLES2 renderer (web) to hide the ugly banding effect.
• Allow choosing the type of anti-aliasing (MSAA 4/8x, FXAA).
• Disabled anti-aliasing by default.
• Improved HUD scaling and positioning on different aspect ratio screens.
• Redesigned HUD crosshair to indicate destructible enemy objects.

The new versions are now available here on itch.io and the Android version has been uploaded on Google Play (pending review).