Thyrian Defenders - 65

Welcome to another TD update, space cadets! All aboard the Starhulk, the Royal Space Forces' flagship capable of interstellar travel. This will be your home for the next several months, or even years as we seek to purge the Exodon from our fine galaxy. The ultimate goal is to locate the source of these malicious invaders and wipe them out for good. We are severely out numbered, and facing an enemy that is highly adaptable. They seem to have a knack for quickly assimilating alien knowledge and technologies into ever more deadly weaponry. But I'll be honest, we're pretty good at killing stuff, too. With crazy SOB's like you, who have the heart and courage to face impossible odds, we've got a moonshot. So strap in, we've got a galaxy to save!

We recently added the Starhulk to the map ui. This gives so much more character and context to the map by showing how your squadron is traveling across the galaxy together in a large cruiser. We show the Starhulk in the briefing screen and it appears in cutscenes, so it was implied as the base you're operating from, but actually showing it travel with you on the map ties everything together and brings even more life to the scenario. Furthermore, the Starhulk is now how you access the upgrades menu by pressing down at any time and selecting it. Before it was just a button prompt, which was handy but felt inconsistent and seriously downplayed access to one of the most important menus in the game. Since the upgrades menu actually takes place in the hangar bay of the Starhulk it makes sense to select it. Also, it's just nice to know you're not in this fight alone and there's cozy quarters somewhere on that ship you can rest.

You see how movement works in the video. It stays in one location until you pass a hyperspace level, and it jumps to the new system. This helps emphasize that you're warping a great distance between systems(notice how each system ends with a hyperspace level), and it also make progressing along the map more satisfying when you finally jump to a new location.

I know Starhulk is the name of other fictional products, so not sure if we can get trouble using it, but it fits the design so well. If it's a problem, I suppose we can call it Star Hulk with two words.

Lastly, we made changes to some of the objectives and showing different statuses of achievement. Before, we just had one class of medal awarded for clearing an objective. However, one of the objectives in every level is to clear the level without taking any damage. This always proved the most challenging task and often hung up your progress, but the reward of successfully doing it was also the greatest high in the game, so we've been apprehensive about changing it.

We finally came up with a solution that maintains the challenge, but makes progression easier. Furthermore, instead of having to do a perfect run, we changed it so you just have to complete the level with full armor, so even if you take a bit of damage you are able to pick up armor repairs and try and finish the level without taking any more hits. This is still challenging because you have to still not take much damage and perfect the boss fights, but we no longer have that demoralizing feeling when you scratch the paint. There have been far less frustrating restarts in my testing. However, we still want to reward the player for doing a true unharmed run with 0 damage taken. Therefore, the full armor medal gets a special highlight outline to signify the unharmed achievement.

Additionally, we've made a different color state for S rank playthroughs, where all 4 targets are achieved in one run. In the final image you can see, orange for standard medals, all yellow for S rank, and an outline for unharmed. These statuses are also reflected in all other instances we list out the objectives. I was a bit concerned this might add noise and over complicate the objective system, but it makes progression so much more engaging, as you now have incentive to attempt more challenges, all the while overall progress is better paced.

These seemingly small changes are actually a critical refinement that's brought everything into balance. Yay!