Massive KDC tuning pass!

Hi y’all! We’ve done a pretty substantial tuning pass for KDC based on your feedback. We really appreciate the time and effort that you put into sharing your thoughts with us. We spent some quality time with your notes and developed a ton of our own as well and I’m thrilled to share our patch notes!

This game is such a joy to work on—hands down my favorite kind of development is fine-tuning numbers for game feel. We’re able to make so many changes quickly thanks to the engine/workflow that we’ve got with our Tweaks engine.

Accessibility

• Add a ‘how-to-play’ pop-up accessible from the opening menus. The pop-up describes basic gameplay controls and tactics for new players.
• Choose your turret position or spectator mode on lobby screen. Click on any empty turret slot and it's all yours. Great if you have a "lucky turret". You can also click the spectator area to observe.

Gameplay

• Hook goes to your cursor when you launch it. Used to go to the edge of the playable space, now you have a lot more control.
• Add hook upgrades. The upgrade system now includes hook size and speed increases to help you grab as much stuff as possible.
• Add ‘boss’ phase. The boss appears in the last 30 seconds of the round and all damage done to the boss contributes to your final score. It doesn’t really attack back, so it’s less of a ‘boss’ and more of a "limited time, incredibly lucrative mining opportunity". Power up as much as you can before the boss shows up and dump everything you can into dishing out damage. All players are awarded with boss damage, so work together to push up your scores!
• Multiplier replaced with cores. Collecting pink cores now awards you with… cores. Starter cores drop at the start of the round to give players some cores grab right out of the gate!

• Add turbocharge weapon. Hold down the hook input to use cores to ‘turbocharge’ your base weapon, increasing your rate of fire while draining your available cores.
• Gold cores are now the only way to get ‘credits’, which contribute to your final score.
• Final score is now collected credits and total boss damage combined.
• Mark final drone in powerup/treasure waves. A visual indicator shows when there is only one drone left in a powerup/treasure wave to make them easier to target.
• Core value tuning pass. With the fundamental change to the way that cores and credits work, we did a pass at getting those numbers aligned with their new functionality.

Performance

• Add “kill plane” collision volumes to clean up weapon entities.

Cosmetic

• Add cover planes to prevent visuals of drones and weapon VFX extending beyond the stage.

All of this adds up! It really feels like a whole new game compared to our initial release.

Check it out when you have some time and be sure to leave more excellent feedback on our Discord server in the kaiju_defense_club channel!