HUGE Update! 25 Maps Added with Brand New Level Art!

Play now on my channel: ArchonTheWizard – Twitch
Join the alpha to try the game on your own PC: Alpha – Stream Defense

It’s been several years since I’ve put this much time into an update. I’ve been working on it since April and am very excited to release it today. As always, I release updates prematurely and rely on you, the players, to help me find all the inevitable bugs. If you don’t want to play a buggy version, maybe wait a week or two.

KNOWN BUGS

• STREAMERS: If you were in the middle of an adventure run before the update, the game will break when you try to continue the run. This is because the game will be looking for the old levels, which no longer exist. The solution is to start an adventure game, then hit the cogwheel in the top left and end the game in defeat.
• Sometimes, after launching the game, the first level won’t load correctly. I haven’t been able to replicate this bug, but the solution is the same as the one before, simply end the game in defeat and start another level.

UNKNOWN BUGS

• You tell me. Seriously, please tell me: https://streamdefense.com/discord
• In all seriousness though, there will be more bugs. It usually takes me 1-2 weeks after an update to fix most of the bugs, which is why you should wait to play if you don’t want to help me hunt down said bugs.

UPDATES

• Experimental change: Unlimited power!
  • That’s right. No more cap on how much power you can hold. I’m just testing this right now and may have to reverse it if it doesn’t work out. However, so far it fixes a lot of issues and adds some unique strategy. I’m leaning towards keeping it, but I’d love your feedback!
  • The nameplate UI has been updated to reflect the change: Your power bar now displays up to 100 power (down from 120). Once the bar is full, it will reset, and an arrow will appear, representing 100 power. The bar can display up to 10 arrows, representing up to 1,000 power; however, you can hold an unlimited amount (you just won’t know how much you have, once you pass 1,000).
  • July 7th Update: So the first version of this didn’t work out; I’m much happier with unlimited power 2.0: Overflow Power. Upon filling up your power bar (at 100 power), any additional power will be stored as “Overflow Power”.
  • Overflow power has one small difference: it’s used automatically. Whenever you have any overflow power, it will be as if you’re powered up until you’re back under 100 power.
  • Overflow Power is shown as a yellow border around the power bar.
  • There’s no limit to how much Overflow Power you can hold, but the UI will only display up to 20 (it’s pretty hard to hold on to more than 20 Overflow Power in most circumstances).
  • This does negate Templar’s bonus which turns excess power into XP. I haven’t decided yet if I will replace that bonus.
• 25 New Maps!
  • Each faction now has its own biome. I also created an enemy faction (for story purposes only) which also has it’s own biome:
    • Templar: The desert of Sanctum
    • Elementals: The forest of Sylvania
    • Magi Order: The crystal caverns of Arcania
    • Wolfclan: The snowy mountains of Frostfall
    • Infernus Brood: The desolate volcanic Soria Wastes
  • Each biome has 5 maps
  • There are now 25 levels of the campaign, each with a unique map (eventually I plan on adding 4 difficulties, so the campaign will have 100 levels)
• Altars
  • The Challenge, Lava, and Invest altar can now appear on about 45% of the maps on Adventure mode, instead of being stuck to their default map
  • New Altar: Power Altar: Players inside this altar will earn 0.25 power every second. Every 10 seconds, it will grant a large burst of power split between the players inside (the more players inside, the less each player receives).

THEORY

When creating the new maps, I had a few goals in mind.

• Avoid super-long maps. Long maps presented balancing issues and could be boring/annoying. The longest map before the update was Lava or Leave It. It measured a length of 43. The new longest map has a length of 29.
• Avoid towers that feel too good or useless. In a lot of the old maps, some towers were just placed much better than others. There were usually 1-3 towers near the front that you always wanted to be in, which made tower selection kind of boring. Since front towers are already desirable, I decided to work on bettering the tower positions at the end of the path. This way the towers are more balanced.
• Remove the “speed up” and “speed down” path markers. They were confusing to new players, and made assessing tower placement unintuitive. I want it to be easy to look at a map and figure out which tower is best for your purposes, without having to imagine how the path markers would change things.
• Make the paths more intuitive. In many of the old maps, you couldn’t tell which direction the enemy was going to move in. It also feels weird when enemies don’t take the shortest path. With a few small exceptions, you can now easily see how enemies will travel along the path.
• Make the maps more readable. I tried to make the backgrounds low-saturation and low-contrast and the foreground high-saturation, high-contrast. This makes it easy to distinguish game elements from art. I didn’t do as well as I could, but I think it’s a big improvement over the old maps.

Thank you for continuing to support Stream Defense by playing the game and providing feedback. I’m the luckiest game dev in the world being able to watch my players live and chat with them. We already have a great little community of players in Discord, but I need more voices! Please, even if you’re brand new, join us in Discord to continue making the game better! With such a small community, I really do value and consider every piece of feedback!

Join here: https://streamdefense.com/discord