Thyrian Defenders - 71

Hello, fine patrons. It's been a while since my last post on here. As I mentioned in this month's schedule post, I recently moved to a new residence this past week. I'm sure many of you know, moving is quite the chore. Thankfully, everything went smoothly for me and I was settled in and back to work after only a few days of hard labor.

In an effort to get a beta out before years end, my recent work has been purely focused on Thyrian Defenders. It's a bit of a crunch, but it's looking like we're on track. The main game is all polished up and we've been working on some of the missing UI menus, among other odds and ends. Ah, but in the 11th hour we decided to slip in another mode.

This time it's a boss rush mode. We weighed the positives of having such a mode against implementation time and it seems like a welcome addition. First off, we designed some really cool bosses, but when playing the main game the strategy is to save your bombs and shields so you can quickly waste them without being cheated out of your hard earned objectives achieved through the level. Also, upgrades allow you to become OP and make short work of early bosses. Boss rush mode strips you of such advantages and forces you to memorize their behavior. This is good fun in itself without the pressure of losing objectives upon failure, as in the main game. Also, it provides a training ground so you can avoid that situation in the main game. However, the main fun of this mode is the time factor. Improving you boss slaying abilities and shaving off the time it takes to defeat a boss is great fun, especially when online leaderboards are involved.

Each boss will be unlocked as you make it to them in the main game. Once you clear the game you will unlock Complete Onslaught, which pits you against all bosses one after another. This will be the true speed run challenge!

We've also recently created a progress summary UI where you can track all your stats. This includes, play time, collectibles, kills, character usage, skill usage, and of course overall completion percentage, among other fun stats. This adds a lot to the experience, and I find myself coming back to this menu after nearly every play just to see the meters and stats change a bit.

Another new UI menu we've created is the controls setup. Here, you can customize your button config any way you like. This is a nice feature for those who want to use an arcade joystick. Also, we added an inverted fire button option. This makes it so you constantly fire by default and press the button to stop firing, allowing you to free up your fingers for easy usage of special abilities.

We're almost there! Stay tuned for more updates and announcements.