New content:

• Mission 2 has been added, including two new enemies

Major gameplay changes:

• Enemy rework
  • This change has been made to make adding new enemies much easier. All enemies are effected by this refactor, some more than others
  • Enemy aggression has been changed to a token system. Each enemy has a certain cost, and priority. Different difficulties change the token cost of each enemy, so less enemies will be aggressive at once at lower difficulties, and some high-tier enemies become much cheaper, so they can go aggressive with some mid-tier enemies, instead of only low-tier
  • Beetle attack has a dash back before it attacks to make being attacked by it feel more consistent. Also, the beetle is a bit smaller
  • Ants have been completely reworked so they don't go fully aggressive out of the gate. They generally are still much more aggressive than beetles, but now, they have a bit of startup time in which they try to keep their distance from the player
  • Turrets have had their firing timing slightly adjusted. Not for actual balance or anything, just made the timing calculations per difficulty level much simpler, and didn't bother perfectly recreating the original timings
• The attack clashing system has been completely reworked. Higher difficulties will produce more instances where the player's attacks lose in a clash against an enemy. This was always meant to disincentivize spam heavy playstyles overall, and allow for enemies that are uniquely resilient to player attacks, but was implemented very poorly. The new implementation is closer to how it was originally designed to work. There's also new animations for when someone loses or ties in a clash
  • This change also effects how attacks like the shotgun and staff dash forward behave, making them much more consistent. Especially the staff dash which would often whiff, despite stopping on an enemy
• Poise damage levels have been adjusted across the board. Mission 1's boss probably feels different as he was rebalanced for this change. The numbers were out of wack from where I wanted them to be, making enemy stuns far too easy
• Poise damage recovery calculations have been changed. Past behavior had recovery only occur while stunned, this was not intended. The formula has changed as well, being recovering faster overall
• Combo meter has had an overall rework. These changes should only effect very cheesy play styles
  • Changes combo meter calculations to factor an attack's poise and health damage. The poise damage adjustments have made it overall harder to raise meter, though the other changes to the meter counterbalance this
  • Increased rewards for more aggressive play. The more hits you deal in a shorter period of time, the higher the combo meter will rise
  • Overhauled the system for punishing repetitive combos. This overhaul has also made it so enemies can break out of certain repetitive combos
  • Repetitive combos are now punished on a scale with higher weights, meaning lower usage is less punished, higher usage is more punished
  • These changes can be primarily felt in repeating the staff dash -> up spin -> slam down combo, and in using the thousand thrust combo, whether once, or when using it many times in a row
  • As more weapons are added, expect it to be a lot more natural to switch up combos. For now, the system demands an almost excessive amount of combo diversity, but it still managable, especially since minimum combo multipliers in the repitition system are adjusted by weapon unlock count   

  Mission progress saving update:

•     Currently equipped weapon (Shotgun/Melee) is now saved
•     Current buff is now saved
•     Enemy state (Mainly if it is attacking) is now saved
•     The amount of charge an enemy has to give from parrying is now saved
•     Saves should more consistently load the level into a non-broken state (Though mission 1 can still be a bit buggy)
•     The version which you start a level on is now saved
•     OLD MISSION PROGRESS SAVES ARE NOT COMPATIBLE WITH NEW SYSTEM AND WILL BE DELETED

Visual and "feel" changes:

• Melee attacks made while enemies are clipped in the player will cause the enemy to slide into a position in front of the player. This should make attacks such as the dash attack feel a lot less janky, as enemies won't go through the player straight up. This *should* also reduce the instances of the player whiffing attacks on enemies clipped in the player
  • This change is not universal, however, as it is meant to make the start of combos feel a lot better, while still allowing the enemies to punish the player for mistakes. This means generally only attacks that start attack strings like the afforementioned dash attack, or the basic combo starting slash attack have this magnetization effect applied
  • Melee attacks that have a "Forward dash" component to them check for an enemy in front of the player, and cancels that specific component when there is one
• Lighting and tonemapping has been adjusted across the game
• Glow setting has been added. Disabling this makes the game look substantially worse, but it also makes it run substantially better
• Volumetric fog setting has been added. Same look worse, run better paradigm applies
• The beetle's attack animation has been changed
• Running animation has been changed
• The left hand's animation when firing the shotgun has been changed
• Added left hand animation to the standard staff combo and staff dash attack
• The staff combo's weapon animation has been slightly changed (Barely noticable)
• Changed railgun's stage 1 particle effect
• Added high shadow quality (This was disabled as it seemed to sometimes cause crashes in earlier versions. Nothing has been changed on my end, just hoping Godot updates have made it more stable)
• Options menu has been further themed
• Some text boxes in options menu have had their logic adjusted to make typing in them less painful
• First Time setup screen preview is now shown behind the options instead of as a small panel
• The round font used in much of the game's text has been edited to be more centered
• The options title text and category text have been given text shadows to make them stand out a bit more
• Viewmodel rotation code has been redone to fit with Godot 4.3's changes. It should feel about the same

Noticeable bug fixes and minor changes:

• Made the game as a whole much quieter. Readjust volume settings accordingly.
• Greatly imporved implementation of optimization techniques. The game as a whole should run a lot better, especially when glow and volumetric fog are diabled
• First person cutscenes have been made *much* more consistent
• Not entirely certain level high score saving was inconsistant, but it was at some point made inconsistant, and that code has been made a lot better since  Parrying during attacks (Which you can parry in) should no longer constantly break animations. (Not guarenteeing it never will)
• Rain in Mission 1 should be a lot more present. The triggers were originally set it this overly complicated fashion that tended to break a lot. They are now a lot simpler and less prone to breaking
• Mission end screen *should* finally consistently work properly
• No deaths score multiplier has been heavily reduced. It was meant to make sure a good score doesn't get replaced by a run with a death, but there's already another system preventing that, so it was quite redundant. Still nice to give extra rewards for no deaths though
• Enemies now have specific sound effects and animations for getting hit by attacks that do not break their poise
• Wall slide code changed so player has more control when hitting a wall close to dead on (Camera direction if not input direction)
• Title screen aspect ratio requirements have been made slightly less strict for the TV screen menu
• Crosshair hopefully properly reflects weapon selected
• Text carets on player input text boxes should now consistently display
• Step sound should more consistently play on lower framerates
• Many bugs related to reworked parts of the game have certainly been fixed, but no percise list is reasonable (Since this would include actual fixes, and outright removals of the parts that were bugged)
  • Check out the major gameplay section for what's been reworked

Other changes that won't really be noticed in game:

• Godot has been updated to 4.3-beta2. This alone isn't noticed all too much, but a lot of changes have been made because of this.
• Options menu code has been refactored (Many small scripts combined into less bigger ones. Not many noticeable changes from this, nice for me though.)
• Dynamic music code has been redone in a way that *should* be less buggy, however, see known issues for remaining issues.
• Began introducing a mission framework into the game to make developing new levels, and changing levels easier

Known Issues:

• VRAM usage is absurd. Without a profiler in the game engine, it's extremely difficult to find why it's so high (A complicated profiler seems to show a lot of VRAM usage going towards duplicate buffers so I don't even know if it's on me to fix, but I could just be dumb and bad). Something suspicious in particular is the VRAM usage being nearly 2.5x higher in the vulkan renderer compared to the opengl renderer. (Highly not recommended for use, but not disabled)
• One of my testers has an issue where the audio system breaks with crackling audio when too many sound effects are playing. Adjustments were made to try to mitigate this, but it seems to have done nothing for this specific issue. If you have this problem, please report it with what platform you are on.
• Sometimes, materials take a second to load properly. When these are shown on screen before they're ready, they show up as an extremely bright white light due to the glow/bloom effect. To prevent this, before fading in, the game will pause for 4 seconds, and the glow effect will be disabled for 1.5 seconds after that. Unfortunately, these artificial load times are the only solution I could figure out to solve this for now. Hopefully future engine updates will solve this, but for now, mission load times are artificially inflated
• Tabbing out of Godot can be awkward. This can make the dynamic music desync, play for a second too long after tabbing out, or any number of other issues. What's new is that the game should do a much better job at resyncing the music. Technical explanation incoming:
  • Since framerate lowers when tabbed out (At least in my case), but the tracked time between frames in the engine does not, the tracked time of how long an audio track is playing slows down, despite the actual audio playing continuing as normal, causing a timing desync. This issue becomes glaring due to how long it takes for the engine to realize the game has been tabbed out of, so an immediate pause can't be used to prevent this. Instead, tabbing back in will forcefully sync the audio track playing with its tracked time in code. This rewind isn't usually very noticeable, but is definately present
• I'm still very dissatisfied with Mission 1's music on a "Is it good music" level
• There's a lot of fixes that weren't listed. This is a problem. Changelogs from here on will be started much earlier than this one was
• The shader chaching system still doesn't seem to properly cache all shaders. In fact, it's dubious as to if the shader caching screen does anyhting at all. Unfortunately, there's no way for me to find out what the actual issue. The shader caching screen hasn't been removed just in case, and has been updated to try to reduce stutters as much as possible

Some plans for the next update(s):

• Finishing and fully implementing the mission framework. Mission 2 is ready for this, but Mission 1 is speghetti, so this'll be the major rework.
• Mission 3 (Takes place on an expanded version of Mission 2's map, no new enemies planned) Comes with:
  • New core (left arm attack)
  • New boss fight

Dev Note:

  Sorry this one took so long to get out with little news! Burnout has been a real struggle for me, as much as I love making and improving Punkageddon, the workload is.. a lot. Especially with how much old, naive code there is. Despite this, there was a big mistake in bundling all these major changes into a single content update. This should have been many major updates instead of one single giant drop after months of silence.

Also, don't mind me skipping update 6.