Last Sunday we had our first ever super high tech dual live stream (you have to read that in one of those epic voices, or it doesn't count). Using a professional setup (*cough* Skype video call *cough*) we were able to give you two #gamedevs (oh wait, wrong site) for the price of one. During the livestream, we both were working on making a lot of changes to the balance and general gameplay of the game to give our closed beta testers a new version to play with.

One of the biggest things we worked on was changing the phoenix mechanics. A lot of people complained about wasted phoenixes before upgrade stages and we wanted to tackle that. The obvious solution would be to make the phoenix activate with a new button. This would add yet another control to remember and more importantly, it would allow you to keep the phoenix and use it more as a survival mechanic instead of just scoring loads of points. That is why we decided to make the phoenix replace the secondary weapons once you filled up the bar, so saving your phoenix is possible, but comes at the cost of not being able to use your secondary weapons. Of course, all these changes go together with an updated HUD.

These changes are a huge experiment and we are still collecting feedback from our beta testers. If you want to get involved too, you should read more about our closed beta in this newspost. Long story short: we are not yet sure if this change is to stay, but we as developers like it so far.

While we thought we were being really smart about implementing this new mechanic, we actually did not take into account that there are some people that like to have a completely ridiculous control setup, which allowed a player to get infinitely many phoenixes. Together with an upgrade generation bug in coop, these were fixed in a hotfix we released yesterday.

Last but not least: next weekend we will be standing at Epicon, a large convention in The Netherlands for gaming, movies, and all kinds of other stuff. If you are going there too, please come by and say hi and try your luck at the latest version of Roche Fusion. I am looking forward to it a lot and with the summer break practically started, there is a lot of gamedev to look forward to over the next couple of weeks.