Rebalanced and improved

The goal with this update was to polish and improve the existing game. In some cases that meant minor tweaks and in others it meant rebuilding from scratch.

The existing difficulty progression has been reworked to be more challenging and while feeling more consistent. The easy difficulty as been completely removed and a new hard difficulty has been added. The existing normal difficulty is now much more challenging than before. 

It's important to give players an easy way to learn how to play, so a new "training" mode has been added. Harmless dummy enemies can be spawned at will by the player and every pickup is available for experimentation. 

Speaking of pickups, each useable item has been tweaked for balance. This included rebuilding the health system from scratch. The original version was too easy at the beginning and too challenging at higher levels. The new system scales as the match progresses, and should be more balanced at all phases.

And what are phases? They're an internal mechanism that escalates the difficulty as the game progresses. Phases were already in the launch version but they were invisible to the player. Now they are proclaimed and shown on the screen at all times. 

There are also new UI updates for all pickups. Hopefully they will make the usefulness of each pickup more obvious to new players.

The last major update is in the end game screen. In the old version the game would end after the player died. Now there's a "battle camera" that surveys the field and a new stats system that lists the actions of the player throughout the match. 

There are a host of other small visual and gameplay adjustments but these were the most important ones to discuss.

Thank you for reading, and enjoy the game!