Bombernauts OCTOBER UPDATE is here! This one is BIG!
(previous version patch notes here)

There are 2 MAJOR new features in Bombernauts now! Saturday Specials and unlockable cosmetic hats! I'll go over how both of those work here.

SATURDAY SPECIAL!

A crazy new game mode every weekend!

If you play Bombernauts on a Saturday (Saturday Midnight to Sunday Noon, Pacific Time), a new game mode called "Saturday Special" will be available from the main menu.

This mode will feature a different variation of the Bombernauts rules every weekend, from interesting powerup setups to different win conditions or even something completely unique! They may be great, they may be terrible, each week is an experiment and we hope you have a... blast...

If you play a full round of Saturday Special, you will unlock a RANDOM HAT for your robot! You can equip these hats onto your bot in the Garage.

HATS!

There are 2 ways to unlock hats. The first is to play a whole round of Saturday Special, as mentioned above. You can earn 1 random hat drop per week this way. It does not matter if you win or lose, as long as you were there for the whole round.

The second way is through Hat Tokens. You can earn up to 3 hat tokens per week by playing regular mode, they unlock at 5, 15, and 30 wins. You can then exchange your hat tokens in the hat collection for whatever hats you desire!

(There is a good chance hats will be reset before the game exits early access, but if this happens I will make sure everyone who unlocked hats before then gets rewarded for it)


Both of these new features are meant to make it easier to find people to play with, by encouraging people to all play on Saturdays, and encourage people to keep playing throughout the week to earn their tokens.

In addition, there is another awesome facet of Saturday Specials which I have not mentioned yet,

CUSTOM GAMES!

Saturday special game modes are all created with simple Lua scripts. This is the first step towards full custom game mode support, where people will be able to create their own custom game modes, however making the API for this flexible and stable enough is going to take a lot of work. Saturday Specials are a way to test out features for custom games while also providing people a reason to come and play every week.

When custom games are eventually opened up for anyone to create, all the saturday specials will have their source released as sample code to build off of. This will probably happen towards the end of early access.

The first Saturday Special will be "Power Stacks!", you can no longer spam bombs, but you get a new random stack of powerups to through every 4 seconds! If you're curious, the Lua script for it looks like this.


But that is STILL not all! We added a bunch of other powerups, bugfixes, and balance changes, and here they are!

VERSION 0.13.0

BALANCE

• triple-blast whackamole now puts the whackamole in a new position for each blast
  
• added Elemental-Ice, Elemental-Fire, Elemental-Growth, and Elemental-Mud powerups (regular pinata set). These make a bomb replace tiles with special tiles instead of destroying tiles.
  
• wrecking ball now has a cap on the force it can apply to the player
  
• added a railing to the winter level, "RaceCondition"
  

MISC

• added 5 new achievements
  
• designed achievments are no longer hidden. It was a nice idea to make all the achievements user suggested, but we didn't quite get enough suggestions to do that, and there were gaps we needed to fill for easy/basic ones. We will still try to add as many user suggested ones as we can.
  
• "screenshake off" setting will now still screenshake when king server smashes
  

NETCODE

• significantly reduced packet count when initiating bombs with powerup stacks
  
• powerups boxes/items now have their contents chosen by the server at spawn, rather than in a separate packet (no more green question mark)
  
• disabled lobby auto-rehosting (if the host leaves the lobby is just dissolved now)
  
• bombs/crates/etc now get cleared when the scoreboard opens (should fix the "explosion effects future levels" issue)
  
• reduced "bomb explode" packet size
  
• slightly reduced bomb, player, and pinata/item sync packet size
  

OPTIMIZATION

• removed some old deprecated features from the Bomb code
  
• removed some old deprecated features from the Player code
  
• added an "Off" setting for Block Rubble and improved performance on "Low"
  

BUGFIXES

• the winner animation now plays its text correctly if the winner's username has unsupported characters in it (will display ? in place of an unsupported character)
  
• unspawned players should now be fully invisible to other players
  
• fixed spirit bomb + wrecking ball launching you into orbit
  
• fixed glitchiness with inner tube + wrecking ball, and when wrecking ball goes under lava without hitting the ground first
  
• fixed an issue where you would keep sliding on growth blocks next to ice blocks
  
• fixed an issue where gold fake-pinata particle effect was unintentionally casting shadows (and massive slowdown when stacked up as a result)