I am excited to include Reality Break in this year’s SHMUP Fest, and I hope you check out the Reality Break Demo! Over the past few weeks, I’ve implemented a ton of quality of life features based on player requests, including but not limited to:

• New Option: Multi-Loot. It is now possible to hold down the Interact button on both gamepad and mouse+keyboard to hoover up all nearby loot. The Option dialog has a new entry under the Input category that allows you to select the multi-loot speed, which affects both the repeat interval as well as the initial delay.
• New Option: Screen Edge Ability Effects. This setting toggles whether certain powerful skills show effects on the edges of the screen while charged or activated.
• Made the game UI respect aspect ratios taller than 16:9, such as 16:10 and others.
• Improved positioning of certain UIs on ultrawide aspect ratios.
• Reworked collision damage, which is now in large part mitigated by ship survivability stats such as Armor and Shields. The guaranteed damage taken, based on a percentage of ship health, has been reduced to a maximum of 25%.
• Increased visible play area by about 20%, and made enemies not aggro unless they are at least 15% of the way in from the edges of the screen (up from 5%).
• Moved all ambient-only asteroids farther away from the plane of gameplay, and reduced the intensity of visuals for ambient asteroids on Haze maps so that they don’t look collidable.
• Improved the visibility of the aiming cursor in mouse+keyboard mode. It is larger and brighter, with an extra highlight as well as contrasting background.
• Made several early campaign mission maps 10%-20% more compact, with slightly higher enemy density. (Courtney’s note: I want to speed up the first Cycle slightly so that players can get to the good stuff faster, and this is the first step toward that goal.)
• Added a new option to control the visibility of damage flyouts: All, Crits, or None.
• Implemented Inventory Sort Modes. There’s a second button next to the Sort button that allows you to cycle through the following sort modes: Overall Upgrade (current default), Damage, Survival, Type, Rarity, Scrap, and Rewrite.
• The Area Scan now also shows dropped loot, fate pulses, and credits.
• Weapon and Drone tooltips now show their damage range and rate of fire.
• Added first pass at an Info Readout in the upper-right corner. It shows a variety of info, such as the current sector, map level, difficulty level, and actual time.
• Added an option to control Game Cursor Size.
• Added an option to control visibility of enemy health bars. They can be set to show always, show never, or the previous default of showing when an enemy is damaged.
• Added an option to control visibility of the laser sight. It can be set to show always, show never, or the previous default of showing it while in combat or for some time after firing weapons.
• Added an option for mouse & keyboard to allow toggling Auto-Fire Primary Weapon rather than needing to hold the input binding to autofire.
• Added support for alt-cycling Equip Compare through all equipped Drones and added it to rebinding menu. The default is Alt.
• Added support for various ways of dropping a picked-up skill without having to slot it, drag it out of the pilot dialog, or close the pilot dialog.
• Exposed alternate MMB binding for Rewrite. (Courtney’s note: this has always been in the game, it just wasn’t visible.)
• Added new “Rewrite” inventory sort mode, which sorts in the order “can afford at least one rewrite”, “cannot afford any rewrites”, “all rewrites maxed”, “not rewritable”.

I am excited to keep making substantial improvements to Reality Break, with community feedback at the top of my priority list. This is just the beginning — now that I’ve gotten through dozens of bug fixes, balance changes, and performance improvements in addition to the above QoL changes, I will increase the amount of new content I add to the game.

I hope you check out the demo, which will get a lot of the new content I mentioned above, and send me your feedback!

Thank you,
~Courtney