by robby » Thu Jul 21, 2016 9:10 am
Helmet Heroes 9.0!
Hello everybody! I'm super excited to release Helmet Heroes 9.0! It's been in the works for a long time now, but it's finally out! Here I will be doing a break down of all the changes. There are alot of small changes as well as your set of major overhauls to the game. The short list of what has been changed, like always, can be found by clicking the version button in the upper right hand corner of the main menu.
-A small visual bug has been fixed in which your pets equips would not show up in the pet mode menu.
-There is now a small 3.3 second restriction in between sending messages in the main chat. This is to prevent those annoying players spamming messages back-to-back.
-All enemies physical size have been reduced by roughly 9%-25%. Enemies were becoming to large. They took up too much of the screen and also made it get a hard to apply physics to them without things becoming glitchy. Also, some of their proportions were slightly too large in regards to the players size. Because of these things their sizes have been reduced.
-Power attack base damage has been increased from 170% to 200%, and the max level has been increased from 200 to 225. This should make power attack a little bit better and get used more frequently.
-Warrior air power slash has had its gravitational drop speed doubled. Base damage for it was been increased from 100% to 130% and its max level has been increased from 20 to 30. This should help it get used more often.
-Arrow barrage max level increased from 4 to 5. A tiny buff for archers.
-Piercing arrow level has increased from 6 to 8. Another tiny buff for archers.
-A jump effect has been added. More sound effects for you actions adds a little more life to the game.
-The physics for arrows and other projectiles has been redone. They should fly mostly the same, but if you notice a little difference in how they behave, this is why.
-A small trailing visual effect has been added to arrows. This will give you a better idea of where your arrow went. It also looks nice. =P
-Although there wasn't much wind physics in the previous version, new much improved wind physics have been added to 9.0.
-About a dozen icons have been added to various user interfaces and menus. Icons help users navigate to their buttons easier, especially non-native English speaking players.
-A very tiny (about 3%) increase in loading your player in between areas has been made. (very minor)
-A new visual shockwave effect has been added. This effect can be found when using grenades and during the unleashing of energy. It is a new effect of its kind, which slightly distorts the screen very briefly.
-On rare occasions enemies sometimes caused damage to players even when they weren't near them, this has been fixed.
-A small explosion mark is created on the ground after a grenade goes off while on the ground.
-I'm super pleased with this addition: Enemy blood spatters have been added! This will help add that extra sense of satisfaction when killing enemies. They all leave different colored splatters on the ground after being killed. Neato!
-A very small tweak as been added to the server-side of the game which which help (SLIGHTLY) eliminate the chance of a load fail in between changing of areas and SLIGHTLY speed up loading in between changing areas. Very minor change.
-All Foreground elements are now rendered on the GPU! This means the pesky bug of the foreground objects displaying in front of menus and other things has been fixed. This also means the foreground is rendered much faster than previous versions, so performance gain there!
-This isn't an addition, but the kill-counter scanner has been removed from RoboCity. There's no need for it since the addition of leaderboards a while back.
-The Robo-City bird invasion is now random and happens on rare occasions. I'm sure many of you liked the old way of summoning them (so did I) and that way MAY return if there is enough requests for it. But given the new update and increase in development time that would have been needed to keep the old summoning way, I removed it. So it will now randomly happen.
-All backgrounds have their combined file size reduced from 4.8mb to 1.76mb (even with the one additional background now)! This is a pretty nice technical change. This means background art will load much faster when changing themed areas. This will also save me a small chunk of bandwidth. This has been done by essentially savings the background art as lower quality, however the drop in quality is so miniscule and minor that you really won't even notice. Definitely worth the drop is file size and load time.
-Bullhorns max message length has been increased by 15 characters.
-Full PvP server has been added. You can fight anyone, anywhere, anytime here. Have at it!
-Not really an addition but worth noting: The hall of fame has been removed and probably won't be getting readded, at least not anytime soon. It was originally added into the game long before the additional of the leaderboards. Since there are leaderboards now, having a hall of fame isn't as needed and development time would probably be best spent elsewhere on the game.
-Another note, is that the Phillipenes region lock has been removed. This may be re-instated again if need be. We'll see how things play out. It will likely be readded, but I'm feeling optimistic so we'll see...
-1 new cutscene has been added.
-1 new mission
-1 new accessory
-2 new fish
-3 new enemies. One for lower/mid levels, and 2 ultra powerful ones for the high level players, to keep them pushing the boundaries of their power.
-64 new areas
-1 new area theme
-4 new helmets
-4 new chest armor
-4 new leg armor
-5 new weapons
-1 new shield
(Note that some of the new designs for the equipment has been inspired and taken from player suggestions. Thanks guys!)
Formula changes
-Hopefully this one doesn't make too many people angry, but the defense formula has been changed. The formula that was in I felt wasn't adequate. The higher level your character got, and the more defense you got, the less that little bonus from your armor really mattered. I want your armor and equipment to play a more important role. So much like the weapons use, the defensive formula now puts more emphasis on your armor. So it is certain you will not be taking the same amount of damage as you were previously. Wear the strongest armor you can for the best protection!
-Another formula change, although not quite as drastic as the above one, is to the damage formula. Because of the above change, I figured that would make players always want to wear the highest defense armor they could, in other words, a warriors armor. To counter this, the +power, +range, +magic, and +artillery bonuses that equipment gives, is not factored into your damage in a different way, placing more emphasis on wearing the armor of your class in order to do greater damage.
(Note, I may release these new formulas soon if requested enough)
Map changes
One of the greatest things in the new update is the addition of 64 new areas!! That's a ton! To break it down, the new map system technically works very different from the old versions. It uses tiles to build it's levels. The first great thing about this is that this reduces the total file size for area art down from around 18mb to 2mb! The area art (not background art) no longer needs to by dynamically loaded in between changing areas. This is a big cut in terms of loading in between areas and also will reduce the chance of loading failing, thus making you unable to change areas or load. Again, this reduces my bandwidth costs quite a bit as well. Another good thing about this, is that this new method of creating levels is MUCH quicker for me to make new ones. So expect new areas to come at a faster rate. The new map system is also set up for destructible terrain, which read on, wasn't added into this update. As mentioned by Gret, I believe having more areas gives the player a better sense of adventure and exploration. Looking back at the previous versions, there really wasn't a whole TON of areas to go to. Now, their are significantly more, giving you a better feeling of the vast world of Helmet Heroes. A thing that was implemented in this map update was that areas that have been untraveled by you no longer show up on your map. This means that you cannot teleport to them without having found them first. This makes exploration hopefully a little more exciting and mysterious. Another great and much needed thing was, this new map system uses all new physics and collision detection. A vast majority of the "glitching through the ground" bugs with players, pets, and enemies should now be mostly extint (although it will need more testing from the players). And finally, on top of all the new maps in a hoard a new artwork supplied by the guys at MassiveMonster games. This really adds a nice new look to Helmet Heroes, I'm pretty excited about it and hope you guys enjoy the new added art bring more life to the game.
Unleash Your Potential
The second biggest part of this update is to "unleash your potential". There is an entire energy system which can be found in the character menu which you can use to power up. This is essentially a very advanced form of rage. You can deal anywhere up to 5-6 times damage while in a fully powered up state if you are near 21,000 energy level. Check it out, a lot to explore here!
Things not added and such
Now, there are a few things that I had planned for this update that I didn't have enough time and felt it was best to wait and work on after this update was out. One of the big ones being desctructable terrain. The new map system is entirely set up for this now. But being with all the others TONS of things in this update, trying to stuff destructable terrain and make it worth without any bugs would have been too much work. It will be coming out at some point though, once I fix any bugs and such in 9.0 and take care of any other things.
Fighting system changes were going to be implemented (although some minor ones were added). I didn't have time for to add alot of the big fighting system changes I wanted to, so expect it in the near future instead.
Another thing that I didn't have enough time for was a new pet or two. We will be seeing a new pet, just not quite yet.
Balancing and bug fixes will be in the works directly after the update and the following week. There is definitely MUCH needed balancing that will have to happen in two places. One being the new defense formula and the second being the energy system and energy levels. Don't
Another thing worth mentioning is that currently all in-door areas use the same texture data, meaning none of them really look too uniqie. Due to time contraints, I didn't have time to make seperate texture data for each indoor area. This will be coming soon though. So right now, all indoor areas look fairly cookie-cutter (the same).