Back with a big patch. This time there's plenty of new features to talk about! And yea I guess I really like the number 1.

First of all, the boss has gone through a graphical and small mechanical overhaul. Zombies that are stranded will now respawn closer to keep the action going. Grenades now have a proper throw animation and you can hold them in hand to cook the timer for more precise throws! You can now configure your own hosting port (which in hindsight I should've mentioned what game the port uses before) (it's 8888 by default btw) and the game does a bunch of saving to remember your last joined IP or last used port.

More importantly however, this marks the introduction of the first batch of loadout options, Talents!
Talents are a set of up to 3 passive abilities selectable on the lobby screen. There are currently 9 selectable talents, and all come with an upside and a downside, allowing you to combine 3 different talents to tweak, spice or minmax your game experience. Along with it, this introduces a new leveling system, currently based on time played alone but will later introduce milestone goals for exp boosting. Each level unlocks a talent and a new level-up screen in the main menu will let the player know what talents they unlock at each level. Unlocks are all temporary and very placeholdery, levels might unlock more at a later date, and the order of unlocks is very likely to change at a later date. For those who don't want to engage with the leveling system and want to get to testing talents straight away, I've also added a cheat in the settings menu to disable and bypass leveling while things are still in the prototyping phase!

That being said, the multiplayer experience has been polished as well with features such as player talents previewing and a ready button in the lobby, along with the introduction of a text chat both for the lobby and in-game!

As far as gameplay itself goes, a huge amount of balancing has been done as well. The player now has iframes to make their life less volatile, overall zombie scaling per round has been slown down in singleplayer but sped up in multiplayer, zombies are overall slightly tankier and points is generally more scarce. This was done to increase the challenge late game as managing points and ammo is now a meaningful factor, but game should feel easier on earlier rounds where zombies spawn slower (in singleplayer) and weapons are cheaper. Otherwise game should feel more balance and challenging in multiplayer as a whole.

Here's your very lengthy changelog!

• The robot boss boi now has a more fitting sprite with limb animations and all. The cooldown between shots has been increased and they now have a melee attack!
• Zombies now have a catch-up mechanic forcing them to respawn closer to the player when far for too long.
• Leveling! Earn experience and levels over time and unlock talents (and more to come).
• Talents! Tweak your gameplay experience by mixing 3 different kinds of talents from the loadout screen in the lobby
• Added new grenade throw mechanic. Hold the grenade button to cook the grenade before throwing. Just don't lose your hands
• Clients in the lobby now have a ready button. Host can now only start the game if everyone's ready
• Chat boxes both in-lobby and in-game!
• IP in the multiplayer menu is now remembered upon saving.
• New port setting so you can host with your own preferred port, the setting is remembered upon saving.
• New Cheat in the settings menu to gain access to all unlockables, freezing real levels in the process.
• Muzzle flash! - Greatly improved effects when an enemy is hit
• Power ups now blink in and out when they are about to disappear
• Game rebalance!
  • The player now has a half-second invincibility after taking damage
  • The number of zombies stays the same on single player, however, there is now 33% more zombies total per round for each additional player
  • The scaling of spawn rates has been drastically lowered in singleplayer but now ramps up 33% faster for each additional player
  • Money from kills reduced to 80 (previously 100)
  • Money from boss kills increased to 300 (previously 100)
  • Weapon upgrading now costs 10000 (previously 5000)
  • Ammo boxes now cost 2000 (previously 3000)
  • Magic box cost increased to 1200 (previously 950) and reduced chance of rolling strong weapons.
  • Perk machine cost increased to 3000 (previously 2500)

• Projectiles (grenades, flamethrower flames and funny robot blasts) can now move through half walls
• Zombies death sound has been changed to be more visceral and gory, alongside new death groans on top
• Sounds for player footsteps, melee swing and melee hits. The player's damage sound has been changed frmo the funny oof sound because it was funny till it lasted
• Doubled the randomized pitch range of the gun fire sounds to increase variety because it started sounding a bit monotonous
• Added press sounds to buttons in the main menu so I don't trick people my clips on twitter are mute to then jumpscare them when maps load. I know this is very specific
• Minor tweaks to the Start button on lobbies. Now you can actually tell it's a button
• Slightly reworked the player name setting in the settings menu to be less janky. Now it just updates the name when you're done editing 
• Fixed zombies sometimes getting stuck in the box room's tunnel entrance - Fixed scripted robot spawns movement speeds being erraniously randomized
• Fixed flamethrower projectiles being shot past walls when close enough
• Fixed melee attacks hitting enemies behind walls
• Fixed the robot getting its line of sight interrupted by walls on different floors
• Fixed the robot's projectiles colliding with things they reeally shouldn't be
• Fixed Nuke power up granting extra money when boss enemies are present despite not dealing any damage to them
• Fixed fuses not dropping for the other clients
• Fixed error spam when a bleeding player disconnects
• Fixed error when joining a server as client

So that was a lot of stuff. And obviously there's still much more to come!

Next on my to-do list is reworking the entire artstyle of the game with something much closer to my original vision. Those of you who follow me are probably aware I'm a big fan of anime. And this might come as a disappointment (to some) but that's the kind of style I want my game to be in. Character sprites and most assets will be changed into a 3/4 perspective top-down art style albeit this should not have any mechanical repercussions. More on it later!

Hope you have a great day, a great time playing the game if you will, as always feedback is incredibly helpful and appreciated! Have a good one and thank you for sticking with me!