CORE - November Update news

This update has taken a month or so of work. I sent out a closed alpha to a few close friends and took in all their feedback to rejig the game ready for a public alpha. Here are some of the main changes!

Difficulty Balancing - Enemy Reworking
The main issue people had with the game was the difficulty of the game. The issue with making a score based game where you become more powerful is balancing everything. Previously the enemies used an equation to scale themselves with your level and the wave you were on. This was all well and good, but the issue was that looting gear and leveling up just meant the enemies took the same amount of hits but could hit the core harder. In order to make the game both easier to start with and add a little more variety, I've changed the spawning system.
When an enemy spawns, they are given a level based on the wave the player is currently on. Their levels can range between 1 and 3, so you will still get level 1 enemies spawning with the level 3s. Depending on their stats, enemies will spawn with greater stats. They now have a random amount of defense in order to add more purpose to the corrosive damage type. Also, their sprites become more threatening because they're a darker red! And everyone knows darker reds are more evil.

Most of this is pretty hard to explain; I'm new to all this news stuff so that's all that'll be said about that.

Defense Rework
Previously, defense worked with percentages. However, this really didn't work well after further testing. So the defense system now works like most other games! How original.
Essentially,
"damage output = initial damage - defense"
Simple, right?
Enemies, despite your defense, will always deal at least 25% of their initial damage. Otherwise that'd be OP. And no-one likes OP stuff.

Random Graphical Fixes / Changes / Things
So, when I got bored of things that take ages for me to work out, I'd go off and do some GUI upgrades or simple effect upgrades.
The tooltips for weapons are now easier to read off and less misleading; previously, due to the fast paced nature of the game, you'd see the tier of the weapon (the first thing listed in the tooltip) and loot it. This meant you didn't actually know how much more damage you'd be doing. So that's fixed.
Coins are no longer irritating; they will stop moving away from you after a while. They also slowly fade away so they won't be on screen forever.

The number of particles in the game has been reduced as many found it distracting and found themselves losing the player quite a lot.
There is also a 'laptop/old computer friendly mode which disables particles completely. It looks boring but at least the game is playable!

Planned Changes Before the Public Release
There's still plenty that needs to be done before the game is available as a public alpha. Here's a few of the things you can expect before it's available to play.
Level ups will allow you to allocate skill points.
An ingame shop that allows you to purchase stat increases.
Possibly a choice as to how you fire projectiles (shotgun, focused, etc).

So that's the major changes from 0.9.2 to whatever version this one is.
If you want to be sent the alpha, comment below!
More news in December!