Demo Update for the Upcoming Next Fest!

Hello everyone!

The Steam Next Fest will soon start on February 24th, and Comet Force will be in! To celebrate this event, I am happy to release a demo update, with mostly some polishing, but also a bit of new content. The update is available as of right now, so be sure to check the full changelog at the end of the post and give the demo a try! And as always, feel free to share your feedback on the Steam forums!

Two new classes

I added two new classes. The first one shoots mines and brings many new effects related to those in the Academy.

The second class introduces a new type. Until then, troop members were falling into the range or melee categories. There is now a third type: support. The new class is a guard that positions itself in front of the Captain instead of behind. The guardian has no direct attack, but has a lot of health and will reflect enemy bullets.

I hope you will enjoy these new classes. Tell me in the comments which one you prefer!

Change to the recruitment cost

This update brings a significant change related to recruiting. The recruitment cost will now go up the more you recruit of the same class. More precisely, the price will increase by 10 gems for each member of the same class already in the troop. My goal with this change is to better adjust the difficulty and encourage using various classes instead of relying only on one. Please do not hesitate to send me your feedback on this change!

What’s next?

The rest of the changes are mostly polishing, small fixes, and quality of life improvements, as you can read in the changelog below. I want to make sure the UI is clear enough and ergonomic to not get in the way of the fun. If you have suggestions, please post them on the Steam forums and I’ll do my best to address them.

Besides, I’m making good progress on the full game. I am now done with adding new classes, new leaders, and academy effects. The v1.0 will have 8 new classes, and I think they all add something fun and interesting compared to what already exist in the demo. So stay tuned for future teasing! What remains to be done is adding new buildings, new enemies and bosses. I am hoping to get all of this done by mid-April, but I need to adjust my content goals depending on how the Next Fest goes. So I hope many people discover Comet Force during the event and have a lot of fun!

As always, thanks for your support, and see you soon for the Next Fest!

Full Changelog – Demo v0.5f

Added

• Added two new classes and their unique effects
• The recruit cost now increases for each member of that class already in the troop
• If some classes are still unknown in the journal, researching a new class will always offer at least one unknown option

Changed

• Improved how knockback is applied to enemies
• Relooked the Crusher class model
• Improved some UI and buildings descriptions:
  • Showing the class type (melee, range, or support)
  • Renamed ‘Unique’ to ‘Single-copy’
  • Made it clearer troop quarters upgrades give additional troop capacity
  • … and a few other things and typos fixes
• Playtime is not frozen during pauses anymore, so now gives the real session duration
• Moved the Quit button in the title menu to put it in the main list
• Showing a tooltip to display the key shortcut of some Close buttons
• Clicking the left or right key icons in the carousel displays (for instance when choosing a building) will now move the carousel