Hopeless Sea Demo 0.7 Is Out Now On itch.io!!!

How are you guys doing out there! Long time no see, Wish you are all well!

This is Potato Cat, Welcome!

Good news, as you may have noted, a few months ago we switched release status from “Coming Soon” to “2025”. Yes, it is 99.9% that Hopeless Sea will be finished and delivered to you before the end of year because we have confidence in our development pace and quality. More of that, we are trying hard to get it done before the end of season i.e. full release the game before the end of June. With that being said, sxxx might happen and nobody can tell what will come out tomorrow, so let’s keep the “2025” here for now.

Regarding demo version 0.7, we have brought some significant changes towards game play: rebalanced difficulty curve, weapon balancing, bigger enemies, crispy enemy hitting effects etc. and, of course, more fixed bugs. You may find details down below here:

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Demo Version 0.7.0.1 onward
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---- Major Updates ----
- More Random Enemy Spawn Pattern:
enemy spawn order is now totally randomized, from now on player will encounter more unpredictable enemy spawn order.
- Floating difficulty:
in game difficulty changes according to time elapsed depending on Difficulty player choose at start of a run. The means of adopting floating difficulty is to rebalance game difficulty when enemy spawn order is randomized.
- Increased all characters' ship speed for better maneuver experience (yes, increased again..).
- All enemy bullets speed reduced, make it easier for players to maneuver/ doge enemy bullets.
- At the mean time, player movement speed are increased a little bit for the exact same reason as above.
- Dead zone of gamepads are now reduced to minimal level for better maneuver experience.


---- Minor Updates ----

- Fixed a bug that prevents system showing which wave player is currently in from wave 1.
- Transport ships (blue enemy ships going downwards carried tons of gems) will now deal no melee damage to players, as they are kind of friendly civilian ship.
- Fixed a font issue that causes text display pixelized problem, which makes text deformed and hard to read.
- Added more visual effects of enemies.
- Rationalize player initial weapon level starting with level 1 instead of level 0 (except characters/hulls that allow bigger initial levels ).
- Extended keyboard control, now using "WASD+JK" works the same as "direction keys + ZX"
- Bomb is unfunctional to enemies
- Fixed a bug that will cause player enter another wave while clicking "Next Wave" multiple times.
- Fixed a bug that will cause game stuck at store page when clicking "Next Wave" button multiple times at store.
- Fixed a bug that will keep the player traits while starting a new run after abort current.
- Fixed a bug that will cause game crash or malfuntion when quiting the current run at trait/store.
- Fixed a bug that the the first 3 to-pick traits are always the same ones.
- Fixed some bugs relate to weapon upgrade information
- Fixed a button label issue that can potentially misguides player.

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Demo Version 0.7.0.6
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---- Game Play ----
- Added gamepad vibration effect.
- Increase torpedo damage.
- Optimize turning speed of homing missile.
- Machine gun fire rate increase dramaticallyfor better performance.
- Replace bridges by safe zone, players entering next wave by touching safe zone for a short period of time.
- Strengthen Wrench trait effect and reduce cooldown from 60s to 45s recover 1 hp.
- Assault boat now have +2 max hp at start

---- Bugs ----
- Fixed a bug that traits selected from previous run inherited to future runs.
- Fixed a bug that traits will be kept for the next run after aborting a run from pause menu.
- Fixed a bug that will stop spawning enemies and cause game difficulty off-balance.
- Fixed a bug that enemy bullets do not disappear after hitting player.
- Repaired a bug that buying armour upgrade increases hp but max hp does not.

---- Graphics & UI ----

- Changed supply ships to orange as player hitting will cause hp loss.
- Added "squeeze" effect that when enemies are hurt, their size will be slightly changed for
- All player boats' profile outline now coloured in white for better visibility.
- Increased size of atomic bomb shell size for better visibility.
- Switched atomic bomb explosion effect colour from orange to blue to keep colour consistancy.
- Reduced player bullet brightness in order to have better hierarchical distinction with much more powerful player bombs.
- Fixed a display demo finish font display bug.


So there it is, pretty much everything is covered here, possibly the last demo of all demos. Thanks for reading! Now it’s time for you to try the newest demo and see how it goes.

Remember to join the discord for latest news and don’t forget to report bugs anyway you can! If you have any ideas and thoughts, I’m open minded, find me in the Discord channel here:
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https://discord.gg/z5JAyEN2MQ -------------------------------------------------

See you there, Cheers!

The Potato Cat