Hi there! After 105 days of development time, COMBOLITE finally launched today on April 28th. Join the discord here: https://discord.gg/MRPH7QWprk

Changes since the demo

There have been WAY TOO MANY changes to list them all here, so I'm going to point out the main ones.

The ball has physics now!

You can hit the ball around and the game actually feels like you're making combos now!

"Combo" system

Whenever you get a buff, there's a chance that a combo gets generated instead. A combo is made up of 3 attack directions. If your weapons attack the sphere in that order, you will get some sort of advantage, like more damage or money.

Objectives give special skills!

Skills give certain weapons a unique skill or some ability that allows new and interesting synergies to be made. I added 20 skills in total for the release, each categorized into a rarity. There's also only one objective at the same time instead of three, so it's a bit easier to focus on them. The difficulty and rarity of each objective is determined based on the amount of damage the selected weapon category did, so weapons that you haven't really used recently will not get an impossibly hard objective.

Difficulty settings

I added 7 difficulty modes, each of them with some interesting twist that should change your strategy. Most of them are harder than the base normal mode, but some of them are easier while still giving the player a different experience. A new difficulty mode gets unlocked when reaching the end of area 3 in any gamemode.

Graphics improvements

I switched from the older OpenGL renderer, to the newer Vulkan renderer, which allowed me to do some additional fancy graphics. All of the maps were completely remade from the ground up, so it doesn't look like a floating circle in the middle of nothing anymore.

Basically doubled, or even tripled the amount of content!

• 8 categories of weapons, with a total of 34 weapons
• 29 collectable buffs
• 448 combos with 4 different special rewards

Future plans

Currently getting the game localized is my first step, and I have made some steps towards that already. I want to definitely add a bit more content to the game, especially in the area department, but for now I will be taking a short break to chill for a bit. If you have any cool ideas, recommendations, feedback, or anything like that, join the discord and let me know!

[ 2025-04-28 16:15:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

New Features

• Added save and quit button to pause menu. (such a great feature isn't it?)
• Added a tutorial that plays when you first play the game.
• Added some Steam achievements.
• Added an area counter to the map.
• Added "battle logs" which shows certain weapon events like bananas duplicating, treasure chests being opened etc.
• Added a setting to disable impact frames.
• Global buffs now show weapon count underneath their description.
• Added playtesters' names into credits.
• Added a custom cursor and settings for sizes.
• Finally added SFX to gems being applied.

Changes

• Increased slow-mo impact effect treshold to +25% of previous PB instead of +15%.
• Changed how weapon descriptions are positioned to hopefully make them clip less off-screen.
• Target damage ramps up MUCH faster in the late game.
• Loading screen plays when the game loads instead of when pressing the play button in hopes of burning out less people's eyes.
• Objectives now have an animation when they are collectable.

Bugfixes

• When clicking the deck view button with 0 weapons, the game no longer dies.
• Buffs and modifiers properly save/load now.
• Dying no longer softlocks the game.
• The "highest damaging weapon" part of savefiles now reset properly when erased.
• Hopefully arrows properly work now again? I don't know this system is so weird
• Fixed a bug where objectives refused to progress after loading a savefile.
• Small arrows of weapons should no longer be visible while paused.
• When selling a selected item, the move back to shop button doesn't break anymore.
• SFX and Music sliders properly save now.
• Objectives now correctly reset after fights
• Changed layout of target damage text so that it doesn't look weird on large numbers
• Shop no longer appears in deck view.
• Shop should no longer refresh prices when you go in and out of the pause menu.
• Locked items no longer persist between savefiles.
• Fixed a graphical bug where one of the fights were skipped on the map, and the one after it was overwritten once.
• Weapon descriptions should no longer clip outside of the window once again

Balancing and weapons:

New weapons:

• Midas Blade: A sword made out of solid gold. Deals +0.1x more damage for each gold coin you have.
• Black Gem: +5x damage multiplier. -0.25x for each weapon on the field.
• Black Hole: Every attack, destroy the item before or after it and gain +20 base damage.
• Treasure chest: Once destroyed, receive between $5 to $20 and a rare buff for a random weapon. 10% chance to destroy itself.

Buffs:

• Hammer: deals 3x damage if the sphere has broken armor.
• Blue Gem: +25, +35, +50, +65, +75 base damage based on rarity. Instead of a flat +25. Decreased base price from 7 to 5.

Nerfs:

• Red Gem: Increased base price from 5 to 7.

[ 2025-02-24 17:25:09 CET ] [ Original post ]