Achievements & Meta-Progression
Steam Achievements: Implemented a complete achievement system with tracking, UI popups, save file persistence, and Steam reporting.
Stats Persistence: Added offline stats tracking that saves locally and synchronizes with the SteamStatsManager upon connection.
New Content: Weapons, Enemies & Onboarding
Introductory Scene & Controls: Added a new introductory scene upon boot and integrated a game controls infographic to streamline player onboarding.
Laser Weapon: Added an instant-hit Laser weapon. Mechanics support multi-beam spread, bounce chaining, size scaling, and per-beam critical hits. Weapon firing and item pickups now record directly to the stats manager.
Snake Totem: Added a stationary enemy unit that charges venom attacks and repositions near the player. Sorting anchors were adjusted and projectile spawn points were moved to the top of the sprite.
Combat & AI Adjustments
Goo Hazards: The Bird Flu Chicken now spawns Goo puddle hazards during specific attack frames. These deal foot-specific damage and pulse before despawning.
AI Optimization: Added catch-up logic to relocate distant enemies and implemented visual indicators for enemies occluded by obstacles. Modified enemy orientation logic to continuously face the player.
Collision & Projectiles: Implemented CircleCast obstacle detection for projectiles and added safety delays to prevent spawn-kills. Added static Rigidbody2D components to background obstacles to process trigger events.
Player Mechanics: Enabled the visual dash cooldown bar and updated the PlayerController to apply armor calculations during damage events.
Encounter Rebalancing: Modified CombatNodes spawn timings, intervals, and reduced the burst count from 50 to 30. Rebalanced weapon parameters including cooldowns, projectile durations, and scaling.
Soundscape & UI Refinements
Soundscape Updates: Overhauled the audio experience with a large integration of new Foley and combat sound effects. Updated audio mappings in Sounds.json, throttled the frequency of player dash and hit audio, and configured the BootLoader to initialize gameplay music automatically.
Interface: Rebuilt the Compendium stats panel using dynamic vertical layout groups. Increased the size of Route Map UI icons and rows. Added input blockers to prevent gameplay stick and D-pad inputs from registering during UI menu navigation.
Script Modernization: Replaced FindObjectOfType with FindFirstObjectByType across runtime scripts.