Hello, I've done another update.

Loading

If you load a save file with outstanding upgrades you will be sent to the desktop instead... the game fake desktop, I mean. It won't close the game.

Operator Tweaks

Many Operators have time-triggered area abilities with talents that add extra instances. This is your Arcane Blasts and your Vacuums. However, these extra instances being loaded into the same talent mean players usually go almost straight from 1 to 3. I’ve broken these in half and put the other one earlier in the path. 

Veil has had a bit of an overhaul to make Frag and Virus more useful, and to plug them into Pointers. [Redacted], who is All About That Virus, also got hit with some strays (positive).

[Redacted] was tweaked a little. I fixed the bug that made the Rush Pointer upgrade not work, got scared by my own creation, and then reduced the pointer counts a little. It doesn’t stop her turning into a perpetual motion machine.

[Redacted] mostly has had a power increase. Otherworld damage was consolidated into a mega talent and Dog damage up. With the freed up space I have added two more talents to lower the number of hits for Dog and to summon more Dog, and give her HRT (heartbeat tokens).

[Redacted] has a new talent that gives Starfall a 50% chance to freeze.

When Operator talent trees are changed their talents will be refunded when loading the save.

Stage / Scoring Tweaks

I’ve reduced the score gain (boss damage, experience) of Large Tokens from triple to double. The bigger value made more sense when Large Tokens weren't fuel for other mechanics and had more health.

I have raised the health of bosses from the first Worm fight onwards, although the final boss is unchanged so it ends up in the same place. Along with this I have increased bonus shape counts and experience gain on these stages, which is perhaps too much of a peek behind the curtain, so try not to think about it? The aim here is to make it less likely players will just explode the boss in one go (with an okay build on the default party), but also make it so they’re not stuck with no shapes on the screen or hit a trickle of experience. I don’t have analytics so I can only really feel this out, but I think it’s better!

I’ve also changed shape respawn chance to be +10% base but halved the gain from talents. My goal with the different Operators is that they feel distinct from each other and the player gets to see things change based on their choices. This means the balancing is probably more vibes based than you would expect. By the end the player will have a party of four, learn 75%+ of the tree, and level ups give a passive bonus... It’ll come out in the wash, yeah? Focus on the fun stuff. However, shape respawn chance is a mix of invisible and strong, so much that Operators without it struggled when doing [Redacted] runs. Which gave me the ick. So I’ve tried to redistribute more of this into the base/stage stats.