Update #97 - Clouds and Tweaks - December 15th, 2015

First of all, thank you so, so much for your support during the launch of Nuclear Throne. We know things were unexpected, and we wish we would've been capable of communicating a bit more - but such is the nature of surprise announcements.

While we're not allowed to go into specifics due to legalities and the like, we can easily say that this was by far the most successful launch in the history of Vlambeer, and such an enormous part of that was all of you on social media.

It was also by far the biggest launch we ever did, and that does mean that we're learning as we go. We're super thankful for your patience, and we're going to continue updating the game to address some issues in terms of balance, fix some things that came up before the launch and some new things that came up after it, restore Daily/Weekly functionality, and polish just a tiny bit more.

We're going to switch things up a bit now that we've reached home from PSX, release status on the game, and update 97 in our long history of updates. We'll be lowering the frequency of updates and livestreams permanently, although we'll have more information on what happens on our Twitch channel in the future. For this update, we're introducing some balancing tweaks, a lot of crash and hang fixes and introducing Steam Cloud.

Update 97 should also address problems with OSX and Linux builds on certain configurations, and if everything went OK, nobody should ever have to touch options.ini again. We also learned to never make the default pause menu option 'Quit to Menu'. Sorry!

For next update, we're going to transition the Dailies and Weeklies over to new servers, hopefully restoring those to full function for the first time after the launch. Let us know if you run into any new bugs or problems.

Balancing

• A lot of tweaking to the enemies spawning on loop. Difficulty should increase throughout the areas a bit more and desert has been made slightly less ridiculous.
  
• Enemy HP now increases less with loops.
  
• Lil Hunter now spawns a second later, and looping decreases the spawn time less than it used to.
  
• Lil Hunter's weaponry now gets more powerful with loops.
  
• Hard mode now starts you out with slightly better weapons.
  
• Tiny Gamma Guts nerf, prepared to change it back if this ruins it.
  
• Energy Hammer now uses more ammo, spawns later, and deals more damage.
  
• Guitar rate of fire has been slowed down a bit.
  
• Energy Sword rate of fire has been slowed down a tiny bit.
  
• Freak IDPD now has better guns with more spread.
  
  Fixes
  
• Fixed bug that started game from loadout screen with gamepads.
  
• Fixed crash on Daily/Weekly load.
  
• Disabled 'G'-key that made gamepads unpredictable.
  
• Fixed Guardian point_distance bug on death in palace.
  
• Wrote better save corruption handling, should stop game from crashing on load.
  
• Fixed additional VertexBufferHandler errors resulting in corrupted graphics.
  
• Fixed Plant B skin unlock achievement not appearing when not looping.
  
• Crown of Risk and Crown of Luck icons are no longer swapped in the loadout screen.
  
• Fixed OSX game open crash on certain configurations.
  
• Fixed Linux game open crash on certain configurations.
  
• Fixed achievement bug with Plant's B-skin.
  
  Misc
  
• Tutorial tweaks for gamepad support.
  
• Default menu selection with gamepad is now 'continue' rather than 'menu'.
  
• Improved Steam Cloud support.
  
• Allow for D-Pad control on gamepads.
  
• Smaller Save Icon.
  
• Retroactive Steam Achievements for a number of achievements.
  
• Certain secret weapons now adjust legacy values in old save files to prevent crashes.