Hello all!

It's been a very long time since the last game update, which was a year ago! Without getting too much into my personal life, I had a full time job which was keeping me very busy, but now I have more free time to work on the game.

The biggest change in this patch is something that you likely wouldn't even notice, which is the highscores API being changed completely. When I first implemented the highscores system in this game I was unexperienced with everything web-dev related, but thanks to my job I now have a bit of an understanding of how to handle things myself. Previously I used this service for managing highscores:  http://dreamlo.com/. This service was great for a quick and easy setup for my game, but there are many limitations and I had to implement a few workarounds to achieve the results I wanted. So now I created a REST API from scratch to accommodate for the flexibility I desired. Plus I could implement other features that I need besides highscores, like registering users and hosting cloud saves. For now, the API is very basic and I want to incrementally improve it over time rather than burning myself out by trying to do everything at once.

The biggest change that affects gameplay is the quick rebalance mechanic, which is actually something that was sorta already in the game. Previously, if the player vehicle stood still for a  second or two, it would automatically rebalance the gun arm to the upright position. That still happens, but now you can press the ↓ key to manually rebalance your vehicle. This allows you to quickly recover from weird angles without having to wait and lose precious time.  It is also only performable on the ground, just like the automatic rebalance. 

I am always hesitant to introduce new controls and mechanics, because the main design philosophy of this game is to do a lot with very little. I am more comfortable with the changes I've made thus far to the controls (the camera movement  and the quick rebalance), because they are not necessary to complete the game and the level design is not reliant on them. The quick rebalance is also based on a mechanic already baked into the game, so I am less worried about the game breaking, although I am curious to see if anyone can break it in an interesting way :)