Hello everyone! Barring some further adjustments and more polishing, this release should be pretty representative of the finished game!

Also, great news! The game has been accepted for inclusion in Catalog!

This release introduces the last big remaining piece of gameplay I had planned for RollerBlade, for which you’ve been seeing the stage for quite some time now! It’s bosses, which appear after those big ramps every now and then.

Bosses

Bosses are procedurally generated as an assembly of rigid decks.
Each deck is surmounted by a “core” that you have to destroy to take down the boss piece by piece.
Every deck can also carry elements from other enemies in the game such as (for now) turrets and planes.

Bosses’ main behavior is to progressively speed up and rise into the air, but they do so quite slowly while they are able to bombard you and get more evasive when you take up too much of an advantage over them or if they lose their offensive capabilities.
Each deck destroyed replenishes your health, making each fight a gambit on whether you’ll take the high risk/reward path of taking them on, or letting them peacefully go once disarmed.

Deflect mode

This update also introduces the last game mode I had planned.

In here, the player can fight only by returning incoming bullets.
The dash and laser are still available as last resorts.
In this mode, the d-pad can be used to slightly offset the player’s position and dodge bullets.

Stats

The statistics screen as it was earlier felt very off compared to the other screens, being only dry text, so I improved it to be fully graphical and animated.
Also it now shows only total stats and not the current run stats as I felt it didn’t add much.

Gameplay

Unlocking some modes has been made easier, as it was apparent the unlocking conditions were a bit too tight as they were.
Previously, wild mode was unlocked by going over 1000 hills in normal mode, and daily/random modes depended on wild mode to be unlocked.
Now wild mode is unlocked by killing a boss for the first time, daily mode is unlocked by playing the game every day for a whole week, and random mode is unlocked after playing 3 daily challenges.

On the making-the-game-a-bit-easier side, I’ve reduced hard landing damages as they could be pretty heavy and accounted for the most loss of health players experienced.
On the other side, basic enemies (turrets and tanks) didn’t feel enough like a threat, so I’ve made their cannons point to random directions on spawning (they used to point away from the player), with the angle increasingly pointed towards the player as the game progresses. Mounted turrets appearing on later larger enemies spawn pointing towards the player, making them more menacing.

Lastly, I’ve added some more large scale variety to the terrain that increases gradually throughout a run.

Optimizations and fixes

As always, each update includes some more optimizations to make the game run as smoothly as possible, as well as numerous bug fixes to correct for all my mistakes ^^