As I will be working on new levels, I also want to add new items and weapons. I plan to interweave three things:

1. add items, weapons and any features I need
2. work on a level (zones + enemies)
3. bug-hunt and polish

I have a high plan of what I should be doing till the game release. Things may move a bit - some done earlier, some later. And there might be new things appearing - although not much, I want to avoid feature creep at this stage. It's more likely that some ideas will be dropped or left for post-release updates.

The levels will be done in order. Just like they're to be played. I plan to do the first pass that should leave them at "okay for a release" and then, when everything's done, do another pass to see what can be improved.

Each such loop will be a milestone. Although updates (demo updates) may happen at any time.

I just finished the first stage of this milestone. After a quite long time, I added a new weapon - discharge/lightning. The idea was to have a strong short-range weapon with high RPM that could be used to wreck nearby enemies. But with some small twists.

As it is a discharge, it's much less effective against robots that also use it. Initially, it was completely ineffective. Actually, you could boost their health. But it didn't look or feel well this way. I changed it, so now you can only heal your allies (which are now limited only to robo-dogs). And it is just not too effective against discharge robots.

While it completely ignores armour, it's ineffective against shields. This works both ways - enemies that use discharge are ineffective against your shields.

And a small touch - it has a minor auto-aim and does not consume energy if it doesn't connect to a valid target (something that may get hurt).

Another idea I have for discharge weapons is to make it possible to load devices with it. One thing to avoid is to not use full damage as the amount to charge as it could be used for infinite energy.

What else comes with the update? I reorganised the main menu and the HUD. There's also "follow guidance" feature that is created for the arcade mode to help getting on the right track + should help to find the ammo/health.

I also removed some texts from the intro that were not required and could be confusing.

And - added "fewer hostiles" modifier for those who want to fight but want the fights to be... less crowded.

I have a bunch of bugs to fix but first, let's add that new level!