05-23-2020

Difficulty Changes:

* Easy / Not Easy now start with 5 lives instead of 3 * Level 2 'Snake Boss' has HP reduced * New game gives you start deltas, depending on difficulty ( 200 / 150 / 100 ) - allows for use of Extra Heart at start of new game * Plasmid "Bubble Snakes" nerfed

Grind / Economy Changes:

* Level Unlock prices adjusted to decrease grind and promote experimentation. Full run is -4500 deltas cheaper. * Extra Life price inflation reduced by 9% per purchase * Key price inflation reduced by 8% per purchase * Key base price set to 100 (-75)

Quality of Life Updates:

* Pause menu now indicates that you will be wasting life if you give up * Warns player if they are launching a run on their last life * Added display on top left to better show relationship between weapon / health * Can now "Continue" after a game over -- world map unlocks are preserved, but you will lose character unlocks and your score.

Graphical Changes:

* Fixed graphical glitch with Totem display * Fixed graphical glitch with Background in some levels

Misc:

* Extra Heart upgrade now gives Extra Heart for full round, and is not lost when dropping below 3 full hearts.

"It's the Economy, Man..."

NQDevon here. VECTORLORD is a mere baby, having only launched this week! And yet it is already getting it's first patch. So what's going on? Broadly speaking, this patch aims to improve the game in the following main areas:

• Balance
• Quality of Life

We've got some consistent feedback from you guys. We want to ensure that everyone who can is able to have the best VECTORLORD experience possible, and so we're making a some tweaks.

Balance

Players are getting caught in the mid-game grind. While the design was intended to push to you towards a stressful mid-section, opening up after MEMORY CORE where suddenly levels give you a ton more deltas, this "Trap & Squeeze" was really negatively effecting players.

To alleviate this, we've rebalanced the game economy to try and promote more experimentation, while helping players get access to powerups early on. It was never our intent to "punish" players with an overly grindy economy -- but we certainly had a blindspot as to how differently the economy feels in the hands of a new player, vs. an experienced tester.

The biggest design change we've made is that we now allow for "Continues" after a failed run. All unlocked levels are preserved, but you lose all character unlocks and your score is reset to 0.

Quality of Life

VECTORLORD health is tied to your weapon - when you have two weapon spheres stacked you are considered buffed and can take three hits before dying. When the stacked weapon runs out of ammo, you're back to the original two hitpoints, represented as hearts. While we go over the minutiae of this system in the Manual, players weren't especially clear on how this worked after playing only the tutorial.

To help with this, we've added a new display in the top left to better visualize the relationship between your weapon spheres and your hitpoints.

This display will also properly visualize 'Extra Heart' mode - unlockable from the deployment screen.

We've improved messaging in a couple places where it wasn't clear that you were risking a potential game over:

The pause menu has also been changed to say "WASTE LIFE" instead of "GIVE UP" when you're in campaign mode and giving up before completing the level constitutes losing a life.

Misc.

We also fixed a couple of minor graphical issues that nobody noticed, and a bug in the Extra Heart upgrade.

Final Comments

Thank you to everyone who has picked up a copy of VECTORLORD so far.

Full 1.1 Patch Notes are also available here.

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