Hey there!
It’s been a while since I opened the browser playtest. While waiting for feedback, I’ve been experimenting with alternative implementations of a few systems and working on some side projects. I’ve now written up the latest changes to Aether, focusing on how players get into the action and try again after a defeat.
The campaign now offers Story and Arcade. Story keeps the full narrative presentation, while Arcade skips story-only dialogue and starts directly with the combat missions. Both keep the essential instructions, equipment and progression systems. Standard and High Threat remain separate difficulty choices.
Arcade also introduces wave and boss checkpoints. Getting caught halfway through wave two now returns you to the beginning of that wave, with full hull, ready cooldowns and your score restored to its value before the encounter. Story keeps the full mission retry. I wanted players to be able to practise a troublesome formation while the mistake was still fresh:
I’ve also revised the support skill HUD so buttons describe their effects more clearly, reduced unnecessary UI updates and fixed a firing timer that made the cannon shoot less often at lower frame rates. The longer dev log covers those changes, the checkpoint behaviour and the performance measurements:Getting Back Into the Fight in Aether: Quiet Frontier
For a mission-based shmup, do you find wave checkpoints useful while learning the formations, or do you prefer building familiarity through full-stage attempts?