Nuclear Throne (Update #91 ARRP) $

[getter77]

Update 49-47:

Normally, this would be the update where we cleaned up the mess we made with the last one. As an experiment, we decided to do the absolute opposite this time, and just push as far as we could! This update brings two very interesting high-level features to the game. The first new thing is waiting for those skilled enough to reach the sewers on loop. The second thing would be the legendary Ultra Mutations! For this update, you'll be able to level up one more time after reaching level 9. This will allow you to pick an Ultra Mutation. Ultra Mutations are character-specific mutations, that are extremely powerful. In the future, it won't be as simple as leveling up more to get them, but for now, we just need all the feedback we can get.
Seeds have also been fixed slightly, as you can now actually seed different levels with the seed.txt file!

Anyway, enjoy all this horrifying new content, and make sure to tell us what you think! We're going to spend next week cleaning up the mess we made in the last few updates. ;-)

Features
Something terrifying awaiting those strong enough to loop. Work in progress.
Ultra Mutations! At least one for every character.

Balancing
Weapons based on tiny grenades now have slightly different timing.
Frogs now drop more health/ammo.

Fixes
Seeds now work as intented from seed.txt, but need to be numbers only!
Toxic now actually heals Frogs.
Fixed a crash caused by screen shake in the Portal.
Weapons should no longer be unable to fire until swapped after traversing a portal.
Fixed a tip for Horror that was too long to fit.

Misc
Some more tweaks to Big Bandit's spawn.
Some changes to the way Plant's snare spawns, you have to wait for it to connect before being able to fire again. Still requires some camera fixes.

Ladies and gentlemen, we present to you the very first basics of seeding. That's right: the magic control over random numbers that will allow players to race eachother and challenges to be stranger, and that pave the way towards daily challenges and their leaderboards. This is a very big step, and also a very dangerous step. The following build might be filled with horrible mistakes and bugs! That is, if you go so far to check our detailed seeding explanation at the bottom of this bit of text!

Besides the seeding, there's some good stuff going on in audio and art land! We've got a voice for Horror, a bunch of new art for a secret area we totally didn't secretly introduce last week, and a bit more! Enjoy, and be sure to send us all the weird seeding problems you find!

Features
Very first seeding tests! More information at the bottom.
Sounds for Horror!

Balancing
Some tweaks to non-existing secret area.
Big Bandit can now spawn slightly earlier.

Fixes
Fixed some bugs related to Big Bandit's spawn.
Fixed an error caused by Lil' Hunter.
Fixed an error caused by the Vault Guardian music.

Misc
Some new tips.
Melting now looks a bit less healthy.
A bunch of new art related to a non-existing secret area.
Clams!

Seeding
As said before, we've got the first steps towards seeding now. It'll allow you to manually enter a seed, which should technically generate the same level over and over again. We don't really intend this to be used to get really good at one particular level, as Nuclear Throne is about improvisation and randomness, but it does allow for a couple of cool things, namely, playing the same level as your friends/enemies! Racing! In the future it'll also allow us to do cool things like Daily Challenges.

So how does this seeding work? Right now, it's pretty hacky. It requires you to put a file called seed.txt in your save folder (info below), and in the first line of that .txt you can put any number or text you like, which will then be used as the seed for your level. Delete seed.txt if you want to go back to random runs.

Save locations, might be hidden folders:
Windows user
users/yourname/appdata/local/nuclearthrone/

OSX user
Users/yourname/Library/Application/Support/com.vlambeer.nuclearthrone

Linux user
*home folder*/.config/nuclearthrone

We'll soon integrate this with the options menu, but just didn't have the time and energy left. You see, making seeding was HARD. Every time it was about 99% done, something else went and broke everything else completely. Let's just say JW suffered some migraine to get this working. Anyway, more user friendliness in the future!

IMPORTANT NOTICE
Seeding isn't working perfectly yet. There's at least a couple of things that'll totally break it. First of all, the seeding doesn't know how to handle different routes yet. If you go to a secret level/crown vault, it'll most probably change the levels you'll get. If you absolutely want the same levels as someone else, agree on the route taken towards the Throne. Secondly, enemy drops are not seeded, but random. This means that an enemy might drop different weapons on different runs. We're still looking into how we'll handle this!

If you decide to play with seeds, please let us know your experiences in as much detail as possible. Are you getting different results on different runs? We'd love to know what you did different this time. Thanks!

If there's any week where you'll really notice that we're back working on the sound effects, let this be the one! There are so many new weapon sound effects in the game now, we're super excited to hear what y'all think! To make our job easier and pretend we wrote a long introduction here, let's just list them all. New sound effects for: Chicken Sword, Energy Sword, Energy Screwdriver, Hyper Launcher, Rusty Revolver, Smartgun, Sawed-off Shotgun, Double Shotgun, Super Slugger, Flak Cannon, Flak Explosion, Super Flak Cannon, Super Flak Explosion, Wave Gun, Grenade Launcher, all Golden weapons, Heavy Crossbow, Super Crossbow, Flame Cannon, Blood Hammer, Blood Launcher, all Lightning Weapons and the Rogue rifle.

Other than that, there's some proper bug fixing and preparations for future updates going on. Heck yes! Have fun!

Features
A million new sound effects.

Balancing
More range for Allies, making Rebel's Throne Butt even more overpowered!

Fixes
Patience now works as it should again.
Inspector slugs can no longer damage you when you're in a Portal.
Fixed various little audio problems.
Named the Double Minigun "Double Minigun" instead of "Minigun", because we're dumb.
Fixed a crash caused by Nukes when the player died.
Fire Salamanders should no longer blow up cars by touching them.

Misc
Updated the post-boss music.
New art for the light beams.
A cool new prop in the desert.
All cannons (except the laser cannon) now break walls on impact.
Lightning Hammer now plays a lightning sound on impact.
Mutation picking now sounds a bit more powerful.

This brings us to a very exciting point in Nuclear Throne! We're getting very close to implementing some of the last big systems before we can start wrapping this baby up!

[getter77]

Update #57 and on back a bit

I remember about a year ago, when we thought the game would be pretty much done... Well, that didn't happen, and we have something much more ambitious in our hands than we'd ever had hoped for! Nuclear Throne has really come a long way, and we want to thank you all for being there with us!

This week we've got some sweet balancing and fixes for you, mainly turning Horror into a way more fun character to play as, introducing the sixth Ultra Weapon, and hopefully making laser weapons something comparable to the rest of the arsenal again!

We also want to ask for your help. In the last year, the community has been amazing at giving us feedback as you all got better at playing Nuclear Throne. We've seen people achieve things we assumed impossible, sometimes within ten hours of starting the game, sometimes after playing for over 500 hours.

You've become really adept Nuclear Throne players, and we want to call upon you for your help. We need new players, people that are great players, that would love Nuclear Throne, and we need them to be part of our community. We're sure you know somebody like that, and if you do, we want to ask you to invite them to the Nuclear Throne community. We need fresh eyes on the game, people that will still get decimated by Big Bandit and that will complain about the ravens in the scrapyard. We need to know how they feel about Nuclear Throne, and we need your help to reach them.

So as a token of appreciation for your continued support, and as a way to grow the community for valuable feedback, we want to give every owner of Nuclear Throne by the end of the year (CET) a free, giftable copy of the game on January 1st. This is a one-time gift, and we're afraid we can't make any exceptions to that date, timezone or any other part of this due to logistics. Some terms and conditions apply because we had to have those logistically, and we'll spell those out in a blog post later. Either way, we hope you bring someone wonderful to the community for 2015.

Onto the changelog!

Features
Horror's beam no longer gives you rads when it hits walls, but instead gives you back all rads dealt as damage to enemies upon that enemy's death.
Eyes A Ultra Mutation now makes all projectiles homing. We'd love to know how this impacts your performance, as it's quite some calculations going on when you go wild with a Double Minigun!
Rogue's Throne Butt now simply makes her strikes more powerful. Still needs some work probably.
Ultra Grenade Launcher!

Balancing
Steroids Throne Butt now produces slightly less when firing both at the same time.
Damage for most cannons has been increased.
Messed around with lasers a bit, they're slightly different now.
Laser Brain has been nerfed a bit for laser weapons.
Energy Sword and Hammer have been nerfed a bit.
Recycle Gland has been nerfed a bit.

Fixes
Fixed Fish's Throne Butt, making it way more usable!

Misc
Inspectors now also attract Rebel's Allies.
Lasers glow more, making them feel more powerful.
Fixed a typo in Horror's Throne Butt!

On behalf of the entire Nuclear Throne team - Vlambeer, Paul, Jukio, Joonas and Justin, we'd like to thank you for your support for Nuclear Throne, your enthusiasm and your feedback.

See you in 2015!

Features
Ultra Crossbow
Horror's third Ultra Mutation. Let's see how this works out! Basically we want to get all the Ultra's in before we start fixing and redesigning the ones that don't work as well!

Balancing
Hostile Horror now gives you 15 more rads on death!
More Big Bandit spawn tweaking!
Snowbot hitbox has been made sliiightly larger.
Changed Hyper Crystal wall destruction and movement code a bit. This one still needs a ton of work though!

Fixes
Portal on 3_3 won't spawn anymore when Big Dog's still sleeping.
Portals now appear again when killing the Crown Guardians on loop.
Daily Runs now always give you that character's default starting weapon. This will mess up your golden weapons for now, but we're changing the way those are handled soonish.
Hopefully fixed the bug where Labs could have a portal open from the start.
Fixed the Ultra Shovel icon.
Airhorn should no longer cause crashes.
Fixed Daily Run data being updated by normal runs.

Misc
Airhorn volume has been increased again, sorry for this one.
IDPD should no longer spawn in Crown Vaults, 7_3 and 0_1.
Crabs no longer destroy props.
You can now find streams and report bugs through nuclearthrone.com

Features
Daily runs!

Features
3D sound effects! Still very early, and broke a couple of things. Explosions might sound super weak.
An improved sound "ducking" system, meaning that loud sounds can make everything else a bit more silent. This makes heavy weaponry sound really awesome.
A first simple round of audio balancing, making everything less of a "play as loud as you can" affair, giving sounds more space & generally also making really heavy things sound a lot better.
Something extremely dangerous in Crystal Caves on loop. Very work in progress.

Balancing
Faster, more accurate heavy bullets.
The [CLASSIFIED] at the start of a loop now clears all projectiles on death.

Features
Ultra Shotgun!
Ultra Shovel!
New Throne Butt for Horror: Using the beam for extended periods of time now heals you.

Balancing
Continuing our much-hated trend, we've nerfed laser damage a tiny bit, we'll see how this goes down in history!
Some changes to Frozen City algorithm. Once again, let's see how this works out!
Robots B Ultra Mutation now automatically eats all weapons left in the level.
Rebel A Ultra Mutation now gives Allies 50% more HP.
Less HP for Snow Wolves.
Slightly more HP for the Snowbots.
Ultra Revolver now deals more damage.
Heavy Slugger rate of fire has been increased.
Removed the explosions caused by Flame Cannon.

eatures
Craters & tiny flames from explosions. Will still get some work in the future!
New Ultra Mutations for Horror, Steroids, Chicken, Rebel and Rogue.
Heavy Slugger.

Balancing
Higher rate of fire for Ultra and Heavy Revolvers.
More radiation gained from the Crown of Hatred.
Eagle Eyes no longer makes you see further. Didn't do too much and just made things more complicated than they should be.

Misc
Golden Hammer is now the Golden Wrench.
Cars no longer die into tiny scorchmarks.
Lab now has tiny floor details.

Features
Ultra Revolver
Ultra Laser Pistol
Heavy Revolver
Heavy Machinegun
The Sledgehammer is now the Wrench, but there's a new Sledgehammer!

Features
Little art details have been added to some of the tilesets. Expect bits of grass and clams, the usual really.

Balancing
Changed Throne Butt for Steroids.
Steroids now also has all weapons fully automatic as their passive.
Getting decapitated as Chicken now lowers your max HP by one, but there are some ways to get it back!
Eagly Eyes now also lets you see a bit further.
Extra Feet now makes you walk normal on all surfaces.
Frog Eggs now have more HP.
Melting's Ultra now requires enemies to have slightly less HP.
Eyes' Ultra radius has been increased slightly.
Nukes now have a smaller hitbox, allowing for better maneuvring.
Shotgun masks are now slightly different, and Shotgun Fingers should work slightly different.
Sawed Off Shotgun now has more range, less accuracy.
Shotgun, Double Shotgun and Sawed Off Shotgun rate of fire has been increased slightly.
Plant's Snare now stops toxic gas.
Toxic Barrels now have bigger explosions.
Golden Weapons now only appear after looping.

Misc
Eyes' Ultra is now explained better.
Rogue Ammo canisters can now be "opened" by Portals.
New bone pile prop.
Art for the horrific boss waiting in loop has been updated.
A new rare tip has been added.

[getter77]

Update #60

Brace yourselves, this is a big one! Our short break helped re-energize us a bit, and that has resulted in this ridiculously feature-filled monster of an update.

Let's just dig into things: First of all, we've broken the 100-gun barrier, putting us at a grand total of 101 weapons! Celebrate this landmark moment by trying out some of the new Golden Weapons, or the incredibly powerful Devastator!

We've also managed to include the final Ultra Mutations, with brand new abilities for Fish, Plant, Eyes (we replaced the homing projectiles with something way more fun), and Yung Venuz. This doesn't mean we're done with the Ultras, as some of them might still be changed around and most of them still need some love, but it does mean you can safely take the Crown of Destiny without ending up with empty hands!

Besides all that, all the weapon sound effects have been redone and we've added a bunch more sounds to weapons that didn't have their own voice yet. There's also two new ambiences for the 0_1 level, an updated Crown Guardian track and a unique little jingle for when you beat those! And all that is just the main features, we haven't even gotten to the fixes (hammerhead and strong spirit have been given a boost), the new ultra icons, or any of the millions of other things we've done!

Please dig in, and let us know what you think!

Features
A new load of Golden Weapons! Say hello to the Golden Slugger, Assault Rifle, Plasma Gun, Screwdriver, Splinter Gun and Bazooka! These won't be nearly as easy to get as the normal Golden Weapons.
The Devastator.
New Ultra Mutations for Eyes, Fish, Plant and Yung Venuz!
Icons for all Ultra Mutations, Hammerhead and Strong Spirit.
Remastered and brand new weapon and swap sounds!
Updated Crown Vault tracks, and new ambience tracks for 0_1.

Balancing
The Heavy Slugger now has a way higher rate of fire, but less range.
Hammerhead now requires you to really push against a wall.
Strong Spirit now saves your live once, and recharges by returning to full HP. Really needs visual some effects for communication purposes, but we haven't gotten to that yet.
No more Crown Portals in the Palace!
Robot gets slightly less drops from eating Golden Weapons now.
You'll no longer find the Golden Revolver on loops!

Fixes
Robot's Regurgitate should now work as intended.
Fixed a problem with the ambience track in the menu.
Steroids doesn't have Stress by default on their secondary weapon anymore.
Weapon Chests on the same level should've stopped dropping the same weapon.
Fixed a problem with the Ultra Shovel HUD icon.
Fixed the sprite origin of the Hyper Rifle and Plasma Minigun.
Fixed a crash related to the Sewers loop boss.
Hopefully fixed the early portal bug Big Dog has.
Fixed the description for Plant's Throne Butt.

Misc
Tweaked the way mutations look on the HUD.
Ultra weapons now have green outlines on the HUD.

Features
First batch of Ultra Mutation icons!
The ridiculous Plasma Minigun.
Improved sounds for the bullet weapons. Still a test!

Balancing
More Hammerhead range.
Slightly more slug damage.
Y.V.'s Throne Butt now reloads faster.
Plant's Throne Butt now requires enemy health to be slightly lower.

Fixes
Stress now works with Steroids' seconday weapon.
Fixed a glitch with the Golden Laser Pistol HUD icon.
Possibly fixed a problem with no portals spawning.
Possibly stopped Scorpions from glitching into walls.
Total Recall no longer stacks Rhino Skin, Eagle Eyes, Back Muscle & Extra Feet.

Misc
3D sound should sound slightly better. This is very much a continuous work in progress.
Rogue now gets a popup when picking up Portal Strike ammo.
Super Toxic Fro-oh who are we kidding nobody calls them that anymore-Super Ballguys now blow up walls when destroyed.

Features
Hammerhead mutation! Break through walls and create instant cover, clever ambushes, or just have a good time!
Strong Spirit mutation, saving your life whenever you need it most (at death)!

Balancing
Ever so slightly higher rate of fire for the Slugger.

Fixes
Wild Horror beam drops rads again.
Sleeping Assassins and Smoking Gators now drop rads again.
Fixed a glitch with the Lightning Hammer icon.

Misc
Eating an Ultra Weapon as Robot now gives you some rads!
Crown of Choice no longer removes one gun, instead makes enemies drop less rads. Needs a new name probably!

[getter77]

Update #91 ARRP.....yeah, there's been some since~

Whoa, the end? Is this really it? After years of updates, Nuclear Throne has come to an end?

Well, no, not just quite yet. While we are absolutely getting really close now, there are still a few updates coming before we wrap up Nuclear Throne. J.W. just wanted to sound dramatic.

We did actually start implementing an ending. Go find the Nuclear Throne, and see for yourself! This also means entering a loop has gotten a bit more complicated. As always, big updates like this might roughen things up a lot, but we're super excited to have reached this point. Once these things are smoothed out, we can really move on to actually polishing everything and wrapping up the game!

With this update also comes our sincere apologies for the massive disaster that was last week's update. It's always a bit of a mess overhauling core systems, but we didn't quite anticipate the level of carnage the update would bring. We hope this update fixes most of those issues, although some bugs and crashes might remain. Just let us know in the forums - while we might not respond to everything always, we do actually read everything.

As you might notice, polish and balancing have already taken a bit of priority this update, and that'll only increase in the next few weeks as we gear up for 1.0. There's loads of things this week, so just dive into the detailed changelog and enjoy the hard work we've brought you!

Features
The beginning of the end.
Actual in-game art for all the crowns!
A massive art update to the Sewers, Scrapyard, Caves and Frozen City! We're really happy with how things look now.

Balancing
Changed the Crown of Risk. Now gives you more drops when at full HP, and less when not.
Changed the Crown of Luck. Now makes you start levels with 1HP, and randomly starts some enemies with 1HP as well.
Projectiles from the  can now be deflected with melee but will still explode when hitting walls.
Strong Spirit now requires you to reach the next area before recharging.
Super Flak Cannon uses slightly less ammo.
IDPD Plasma now explodes when hit instead of being deflected by melee.
Big Rats now deal more damage when dashing.
The Buff Alligator now shoots slightly faster projectiles with more spread.
Snow Tanks have been given faster reaction time.
Energy Hammer rate of fire has been decreased.
Super Slugger rate of fire has been increased.
Bouncer Shotgun now costs 1 less ammo to fire and shots have a tiny random offset.
Elite IDPD now spawns running.
Energy Sword and Energy Hammer now both spawn 1 area later.
Scorpions now have a minimum firing range.
Loop enemy groups now scale with loops.

Fixes
Fixed a lot of the crashes introduced in the last update.
Quick Restart now gets rid of crowns.
Mutations are no longer kept between games.
No more crowns/cursed chests on dailies from the start hopefully.
Health higher than max is no longer drawn.
 
Reload values are shown properly on the HUD when usings Y.V.'s active.
Fixed the HUD Ultra icons for Crystal and Fish.

Misc
Update to Crown Vault tiles.
Update bullet, shotgun, and slug projectiles for readability.
New Portal Strike graphic.
Update Guardian projectile graphic.
Tweaked the IDPD portal graphics.
Even more ways cars can appear in the Scrapyard!
Tiny weapon swap animation on the player.
Changed the conditions that trigger B-tracks a bit.
Vault Statues are now always surrounded by some bandits.
Crown movement has been updated.
Updated Strong Spirit again for readability.
Tiny tweak to Eyes A Ultra icon.
Hopefully fixes the Linux crashes for a few more people. Still not everybody, we think. Let us know if it persists!

As always, thanks for being with us on this entire journey. Now that we're at the Beginning Of The End, it's increasingly clear to us just how much we depend on you to give us the feedback we need, spread the word to reach new players and to keep us motivated until the finish line. It's just a bit longer, and things might get a bit... irregular the next few weeks. We hope for your continued support!