Hi!

I had a chance to watch a lot of people play Splinter Zone during a festival last week and I saw a lot of stuff that I didn't like. This update adresses most of it and should make the game a bit less clunky to play. I'm also working on a much larger update that is going to add more content to the game, but this one's still a few weeks away from being done.

Anyway, here are the notes:

•  Arrows on conveyor belts now have different colours depending on their direction
•  When you're below level 3, your XP only gets cut by 25% after getting hit. You still lose 50% of your XP, when you at level 3 or above
•  Changed the placement and length of some ladders
• Adjusted the height of some platform, to make some jumps less awkward
• Made it less likely that the camera breaks in some places
• Delayed some enemy attacks, to give players a bit more time to attack them before getting hit
• Adjusted the placement of some enemies and also the way they spawn, should you approach them from the right side of the screen

The changes mostly adress cases where people were having trouble, where I did not want them to have them. The biggest adjustmen is probably the XP loss (again) and the reason for it is the same for when I made the first adjustment. First time players get hit a lot, because they're still learning how to deal with enemies. Getting hit often means they won't get enough XP to gain levels, which makes it less likely they start learning about how they work and how to use Hyper Mode. With this adjustment I hope that it's now possible to quickly gain at least one level without much trouble. The higher XP loss at level 3 and 4 is acceptable in my opinion, because the benefit from having these levels is so high. I don't want it to be trivial to reach the higher levels, because the game gets significantly easier once you reach them. At the same time I want people to catch onto the level system and hyper mode as quickly as possible.

Anyway, please let me know what you think. Balancing this whole stuff is tricky, because I need to make it accessible to new players, without trivializing the challenge for those of you who already know the intricacies of the game.

As always, thank you very much for your support and your interest in this game. There are not that many of you out there, but be sure that I appreciate every single one of you.