Weekly Update 5: (too much) progress

Still comitted to weekly updates and still delivering. Well, kinda. We indeed made great progress, we are even 1 week ahead of the schedule. However with this update our game became too big to be playable in the browser. The game definetely should not be this big, however this was a expected side effect of our unsual workflow when it comes to implementing Assets. We are hoping to optimize the game size with the next Update, however I can't promise anything at this point. But for those of you who decide to download the game, or simply want to know what happened during the last week, here is a quick summary:

• Hub Progression: We finally implemented a early version of our planned progression system. We implemented a ranking System that judges you based on your performance in each level. With these level scores you then level up the Hub room, unlocking new stuff within it. The hub has 3 seperate levels: Easy, Medium and Hard. You increase these levels by completing levels of their respective difficulty during the runs.
• Boss Progression: Remember the boss at the end of the run? Well, he got promoted to the final boss of the game and will no longer appear during Runs. Instead when you now finish a run you will be able to open one of 4 locks. Once you opened all of them the door in the hub room will open. From there you can access the true final boss of the game.
• Arena level: Since the run boss is no more we added a new final challange for the run. Arena Levels. You will have to survive a room of ever more spawning enemies for 3 minutes before you truly won the run. The difficuly will also increase every 30 seconds. Those levels are still in early development, so expect more changes to them in the future.
• UI Improvements: Nope, we are still running on placeholder Art. However we did rework the two important screens. When you now finish a level you will be presented with some stats, but can now also see your rating, aswell as your progress towards the next hub unlock. Additionally you now have a timeline showing you how far you are in the run. You can even compare your stats to how you did previously in the same run. As for the run complete screen: It now shows you your total stats throughout the run, aswell as a total rating. We also added the ability to open locks on this screen, as you make progress towards the final boss.
• As always this update includes even more smaller stuff that are either not nodeworthy enough or that I simply forgot about

As mentioned before we are roughly a week ahead of schedule or to be more concrete: We added all of the big features that we wanted and are now focusing on polishing everything we got. The UI and Settings menu especially are going to be a focus of that. So look forward to that in next weeks update