Advanced Invasion 1.1 Update

My efforts to create a fleet of addons for tertiary functions of my games have come to a head, and I am pleased to share that - after way too bloody long - I have finally pushed an update for Advanced Invasion.

My plan for test driving my addons was to use them to help port my old games to Godot 4, and overhaul their systems. I always meant to push an update to Advanced Invasion, since there were aspects I was dissatisfied with. Plus, Newgrounds users had left a bunch of good feedback in reviews and I wanted to integrate some of it.

Unfortunately I got busy for absolutely ages, but now that I was porting Advanced Invasion to Godot 4 and adding all my addons, it was a good opportunity to really polish the game.

So without further ado, I present the trailer for the Advanced Invasion 1.1 update:

Here’s the patch notes for what exactly’s in the update:

Patch Notes

Update 1.1 brings a major overhaul targeted at several major pain points in the game. The headline items are a more forgiving experience on the lower difficulty, an overhauled final boss battle, improved cutscenes and dialogue in the middle of the game, and a major interface overhaul.

You will also see a slew of social icons on the main menu. If you enjoyed Advanced Invasion, please do consider following me to keep up with my future work

Mechanics

• Difficulty settings have been renamed. Casual is now Standard, and Normal is now Hardcore.
• Boss battles now have slightly easier mechanics on standard difficulty. The difficulty descriptions have been updated to reflect this.
• When playing on standard, respawn mechanics have been improved.
  • If you have lives left, you will teleport to a safe location after falling into pits (whether bottomless or heat blocks) instead of restarting the level.
  • On certain moving platform levels, where waiting for the platform to return would take way too long, the platform snaps back to an accessible location if you respawn.
  • This means that the extra lives granted to you by Standard mode should now be helpful in all situations in the game.
• Major overhaul to the final battle
  • The final battle now includes viruses with shields on top.
  • In the final battle, your ally now has to contend with horizontally-shielded viruses as well. They are also able to react intelligently to a few more situations. This should make the battle feel a little more fair, and also give you an example of what to do to win the battle.
  • In the final battle, your ally now also has lives if you are playing on standard.

Story

• Added extra expository dialogue before the first cutscene fades in.
• Overhauled the second meeting with your teal ally into a full level. Dialogue has been completely overhauled in this level and most of it is completely new.
• Overhauled post-boss cutscene after the square virus boss with new dialogue and different animation.

UI

• The UI now scales when playing on high resolutions (e.g. 4K). There is a slider in the options menu to customise this behaviour.
• Improved UI styling, covering many previously unstyled elements.
• Added controller support to menus.
• Overhauled main menu with a nicer-looking and more usable layout.
• Added social links to the main menu.
• Overhauled the jukebox. It now has freshly-written per-track liner notes, and supports complex playback features like shuffle or looping individual tracks.
• Overhauled options menu.
• Added custom keybinds to options menu.
• Made minor changes to achievement menu and popups (these are a consequence of under-the-hood changes)
• The achievement menu is now accessible from the pause menu.
• Overhauled about menu. Third-party license information is now clearer, more thorough, and separated from the credits.

Bugfixes

• Fixed jitter when the player character moves.
• Fixed a previously broken non-functional feature that would have allowed you to zoom the camera manually. You can now use the scroll wheel to zoom in and out.
• Fixed bullet firing when using spacebar to close dialogue

Technical

• Migrated engine version to Godot 4.7.2.
• Simplified display settings on the web platform (resolution now automatically adjusts to the size of the canvas on web).
• Overhauled how achievements work under-the-hood.
• Several save file formats have been changed. Existing files will automatically be upgraded when you start the game.
• Calculation of valid zoom levels for the camera have been changed. You may see slightly different zoom levels than before on certain resolutions.

What’s Next

I’ve also been working on similar updates for Squid Savings and CircleRC. For Squid Savings, it’s nothing major. Just migrating to the latest Godot version so I can drop in my new achievement handling.

CircleRC will be a big deal, though. I neglected to upload those to Newgrounds and Game Jolt because I wanted to add achievements first, and now I’ll finally be getting around to doing it. The Newgrounds release should be pretty exciting since Newgrounds is quite good at getting a lot of eyes on your game, and I reckon the Newgrounds community would enjoy it.

CircleRC should be getting a few extra levels as well. 14 doesn’t feel like enough. I don’t want to go too crazy, though, since I want to start making new games soon. I think adding 6 more to make 20 should bring us to a nice round number.