Galacide News

We’ve had a big release on other platforms, and brought the improvements made along the way to the Windows version as well!

We’ve been lucky to work with 3 talented voice actors to bring the characters of Edrist, Ajax, Konel, and Bucket to life. Now, playing through the campaign sounds wrong without them. Their websites as well as many other changes you can check out below!

Unfortunately, this update is not yet available for Linux. We hope to bring that, and a Mac version to you very soon!

This is an exciting update that should bring a lot of energy to Galacide. Check-in on our Discord for more updates!

Check out our updates to Dystopia and Blade Symphony that has been released alongside this as well!


[h2]Changes[/h2]

• All characters now have voiceover audio for every dialog line in the game. Thanks to Madison Lee, Garrett Kiesel, and Wolf Williams!
  
• Added outlines to player ships to make it easier to see your own ship, especially useful for when there are many players in multiplayer.
  
• Any number of players can now initiate warp in multiplayer. The speed of the warp will scale with the number of players currently at the front of the screen.
  
• Made the “Hold to Ready” bar visible at all times on the ship select screen until the player readies up.
  
• Changed dialog text within the tutorial to show button mappings for the gamepad.
  
• Changed some patterns of various Bit configurations in the Tutorial and the first Campaign level.
  
• Updated Unreal Engine version to 4.24.3 from 4.20.1.
  

[h2]Optimizations[/h2]

• Gunfire volume now scales based on player count.
  
• Optimization of various assets, materials, and lighting to improve performance on lower specs hardware.
  

[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]

• Fixed Bit idle animations sometimes only playing once.
  
• Loading screen should no longer stutter during loading.
  
• Fade from black on puzzle selection screen should fade all parts of the puzzle selection screen correctly.
  
• Missiles should no longer sometimes change direction drastically.
  
• Snake Boss vacuum projectile should no longer fire backwards.
  
• It should be impossible to become stuck in the tutorial by morphing Bits that are unintended to be cleared.
  
• Player beams should no longer overlap while playing in multiplayer, causing Z-fighting.
  
• The player can no longer select any ship by readying it, regardless of it's locked state.
  

Check out the latest update for our last game, Blade Symphony, too!

We're incredibly excited about this. After three years of silence, we have a new update for Galacide with tons of improvements.

The Warp Ahead update brings Galacide from Unreal Engine 4.10.1 to 4.20.1, and now we have Steam Controller Support and Mouse Control on all of the menus, along with many changes below!

This is a big step for us, as we've been keeping the engine updated for quite some time, but haven't been able to push an udpate. Stay tuned to our Discord for more updates!

• Added Steam Controller support
  
• Added mouse control to the main menu, pause menu, and level select screens
  
• Added a “hold [key] to ready” prompt to the ship select screen
  
• Changed the “scores” screen to work more directly with the steam API
  
• Added new indicators for bomb scrap so players can tell exactly what will explode
  
• Changed enemy bombs to have higher contrast and be more noticeable
  
• Updated the attack pattern of the miniboss to make it more variable
  
• Changed the lighting on Mine Entrance so that players could more easily identify gameplay elements
  
• Added a filter between the background and the “bitwall” when things get hairy to make it easier to focus on gameplay
  
• Added a “scrap pool” at the back of the screen so that players have more options for moving through levels
  
• Slight damage change on battleship missiles to improve balance
  
• Updated credits
  
• Changed tutorial to be more comprehensive
  
• If bits are clearing, combos will no longer end
  
• Increased the score value of multimatch combinations
  
• Increased control to enemy destruction screenshake
  
• Increased enemy “keep away” avoidance to keep enemies from clumping together
  
• Added new enemy rotation behavior
  
• Added new particles to make enemy attack direction more clear
  
• Ship control has been improved, providing players with quicker acceleration and turning.
  

We've pushed the Warp Ahead update for Linux, but as we are a small team, have limited equipment for testing. Our initial tests have shown some potential framerate issues, and our testers have seen small graphical problems, but we would love your feedback in our forums or Discord to navigate and address any issues you may find on Linux.

• Fixed multiplayer warp bug
  
• Fixed a bug where turrets were not flashing when damaged
  
• Fixed some text clipping in various menus
  
• Locked resolution to certain ratios to eliminate bugs related to window size
  
• Fixed an issue where scrap would sometimes disappear from puzzle levels
  
• Made it much easier to pick up, drop, and ignore scrap in puzzle mode
  
• Fixed the Mine Entrance boss ball attack to not look like power ups
  
• Fixed some achievements that were not unlocking properly
  
• Fixed a bug where certain enemies always moved up and left
  
• Fixed a bug where particle effects would spawn multiple times causing the game to lag
  
• Fixed the fighters sine wave bullet patterns
  
• Fixed problems with controllers and keyboards not respecting one another in coop mode
  

To celebrate our ongoing work on Galacide, future MacOS release and (hopefully) Nintendo Switch release, we've lowered the price of Galacide to 4.99!

We're excited to have Galacide show in Steam's $5 or less section, and hope this means more people can enjoy our favorite shmup+puzzler ("shmuzzler!")

Look forward to more updates in the coming months about our recent work. Thanks for your support!

The previous announcement had to do with an update that we've been hard at work on. We currently are juggling work on four other projects, one of them being the upcoming Harmonious Prelude update. So let's talk about the progress on the next update for Galacide:


The largest new feature for Galacide in the next update will be Mouse Control. Currently, we force everyone to navigate the menus using WASD or keyboard arrows, which really sucks. This was because Galacide was originally created on such an earlier version of Unreal Engine 4, that made it impossible for us to produce a mouse cursor easily.

We understand that, in order for Galacide to be successful on future platforms, and for players to have immediate understanding and enjoyment, they need to use a mouse on PC/Mac/Linux. So, one of our talented UE4 programmers, Michael Lee, has been hard at work on re-building the menus from the ground up to support the UMG system that UE4 provides us. Here's a video of his progress:




Unreal Engine 4 has certainly provided much better support for Mac in recent years, and we're finding that Galacide runs at 60fps or better on a pretty old Mac we have for building and testing. We'll be updating Galacide and offering a Mac version of the game in our next release! We hope that this isn't our last platform, as we'd love to put Galacide on consoles in the future. More on that later :)


In addition, out of the box we only offered Galacide in English. Updated versions of Unreal Engine 4 have made it much easier for us to localize the text throughout the game. We're hard at work crowdsourcing translations for Galacide, and hope to implement everything for the next update.


We've heard a lot of the feedback on Galacide, and while enjoyable for most, it seems people tend to prefer the split between SHMUP and Puzzle. We've toyed around with changes to levels to increase this gap, and we're having internal discussions. We'll followup in the next few months with more information on what this looks like.

Thanks for reading!

Hey all,
We've had a few updates sitting in the queue for some time, that should be out sometime this month.

A few bug fixes leftover from early development
Galacide on latest version of Unreal Engine
Small fixes and optimizations due to new version of Engine
Potentially a Mac OSX port! Early tests showed a pretty great framerate improvement on UE4 4.16.2 as opposed to the early versions of Unreal that Galacide was developed using.

Looking forward to the rest of January, stay tuned! We'll make another post when it's been released.
Puny Human