Early Access 1 - Third monster and What's next?

So far, I labelled Spin Knight as "Prototype" because it felt like a playable idea. It was playable but barebone. But over the last few months, new features quickly added up and, with the release in the game's third monster, I finally feel like I have enough content to say that Spin Knight is a complete little game. Of course, I won't settle for the minimum. The game could still use a lot of polishing and improvements, hence the new "Early Access" status. Here is a short list of the features I want to add or improve:

• Music and sound design
• Visual updates for quality and colorblind accessibility
• Improvement to the UI look and usability
• Rework of the mouse and touchscreen inputs
• Performance improvements

And I will probably keep adding new monsters and game modes to the game since this is the fun part of development. I've been working on Spin Knight since September of last year but the project still feels fresh to me. I'm looking forward to see where this little game can go. If you are reading this, thank you for your time and your curiosity, it means the world to me.

Patch Notes

New monster: The Big Red Slime

• The Slime has a spawn cost of 9. Therefore, it can spawn starting at wave 5 in single player and it will have 1/3 chance to spawn for every 9 credit a wave has.

I will keep it's behaviour a secret. I believe it's quite clear and will give a couple of fun surprises to players.

Balance

• Shellers spawn cost: 4 -> 5
• Sheller drag while stunned: 50 -> 25% per second
  
• Fixed an issue where the shell had no drag. Value is 75% per second.

Even though it's not very aggressive, the Sheller still takes a lot of room on the map. It's increased cost will give it a little more space to itself. But the reason why it was (still) tough to deal with is because the Shell went bouncing everywhere and often came back at the player too fast to react. This bug fix and tweak will make it so the Shell will stop much sooner and instead, the Sheller will go further, still creating a decent distance between them without creating a murderous pinball.

• Removed the spike-balls from the environment.

The spike-ball was plainly frustrating. You had to always remember their locations or you'd risk randomly dying from something that was offscreen. On top of that, the Shellers have the same purpose of being a dangerous thing you can throw around but it actively does something and you can't forget it under a tree.

• Tree map density .06 -> .24
• Large rocks map density .1 - > .08
• Created medium rocks. They are about half as large as the big version and significantly lighter. They have a map density of .17

Trees visually add a lot to the environment without actually taking a lot of space. Since I was changing their look, I took that opportunity to be much more deliberate with the their transparency so nothing is every fully hidden underneath. This allowed me to put more on the map without making blind spots. On the other hand, rocks took a lot of place and were not much more interesting than walls. I removed a few and instead added smaller ones that are much easier to move around.

Other

• Updated the sprites for Trees, Rocks, Pebbles and Grass patches.

On top of the tree improvements, I had two goals for these updates. Remove some remaining non-original assets and unify the style of the game to be mainly made of ellipses and lines.

• Dead objects will now collide with living elements. They will be affected by those but won't affect them so they won't hinder the players or monsters while playing.
• Press F2 to toggle blue arrows for players and weapons velocity and red arrows for player inputs.