Join the Beta Testing!

The beta version of Enfora Star is now available on Steam! So go and give it a shot!

Enfora Star is also going to Steam Next Fest this October, so be sure to be there, especially on the first two days! Play, test it, and try again. The game is not the easiest one, even on easy difficulty. You can also play it on Linux if you are not a Windows user.

I'll link the trailer here if you have not yet seen it. It introduces the key features.

Combos!

This is probably the last huge new feature for Enfora Star, and it is a combo system.

So now if you destroy enemy droids in a row fast enough, you'll earn more points depending on how long your combo is.

Bigger combo = more points = more defenses.

September's Progress

Besides the combo system, I have mainly been focusing on testing and bug fixes. And if you are making a game yourself, preserve time for this!

These will take a huge amount of effort, and you'll find a bunch more bugs when you are testing. Take your time and have patience; testing the same thing over and over again will eat part of your soul. ;)

I hope I do not curse myself, but for now it feels that I have a very good situation with the bugs right now. So, let's hope for the best!

However, there are some new features and updates:

• The combo system as mentioned already
• A new song
• Translations are coming: Japanese and Chinese!
• Steam stats page
• Achievements
• New fonts
• Game area boundaries are now colored with green miasma.
• Space mine level 2 spawns 5 mines.
• Ammo pool optimization
• Weapon swap with Shift + mouse wheel
• Many, many bug fixes

Not all of these are in the beta, but they will be part of the release, of course.

Steam statistics

Achievements

Game area boundaries are visualized in green miasma

The Bug

One of the bugs was a really annoying one. If you have played the game from the start and manage to get to the second or third special level, around waves 22-27, there is a moderate chance the spawners will get messed up and the game will crash.

There were some hints beforehand of the actual crash: special waves only spawn a fixed amount of enemies from pre-defined spawners. But for some reason, I got a random amount of enemies too from random and the fixed spawners. And that messed up the enemy calculations, because there were more enemies than there should be.

This was a headache to debug, because this never happened if you started the game just before the special wave or a few waves back. You always had to play from the start.

Still, I'm not 100% sure where the problem was. But after some manual initializations for the spawners when special levels are started, it seems to fix the issue. This sounds very easy, but I tried many many things before this. And I thought the spawner logic was ok, because it had been working over a year. So, no huge realization learned, but maybe my spawner's working logic is overcomplicated.

Just keep things simple. That really will pay off later on!

Thanks to the Beta Testers!

Thanks to all who have provided feedback already! I always like to get feedback about this project, even if it's negative! So I encourage you to provide it! :)

All parts are finally in place. What is left is the finalizing and tweaking part. This feels a bit fast, since the beta has not been out that long, but I'll soon announce the release date of Enfora Star. So stay tuned for that!

Still, even if the release will be soon, I'll add updates related to your feedback. If your suggestion is not found in the release, it might be found in a patch later.

So, always provide feedback, that really helps!

Try out the beta, and try to beat my high score: 17,081 pts. The game is not that hard! ;)

Teemu, TheAspen