Hellloooo everybody, Pannda here writing about my newest update to my beloved game, Lifespan.

Almost two years ago the game originally released for the GMTK 2022 game jam and got an overall rank of 3,593 out of 6,049 submissions!

The game did not start even close to where it is now and I am so glad I got to develop, update, and publish what has become one of my favorite games I have made so far; no matter what, I think Lifespan will always have a nice little spot in my heart.

The game has slowly gained more aesthetic changes since it's original release making it one of my most beautiful games made so far; the game has also gained more gameplay features and changes according to what the community had said and what I have felt would be good changes; I hope everyone can agree.

Here's a summary of some of the features added over the past updates:

• secondary abilities
• modifiers
• more classes
• bigger arena
• online multiplayer
• more player upgrades
• more enemies
• stronger enemies
• stage selection
• more bosses
• ability synergy
• many quality of life changes
• more space aesthetics
• story improvements
• and balance changes

This list definitely does not include everything, but does include some of the biggest changes over the past two years.

Because this is a big update and so much work has been put into the past 2 years of working on the game, that and the fact that I need financial stability, Lifespan is no longer free sadly but only retails at US $4.99. The jam and post-jam versions will remain free to all.

As always I am an absolute sucker for patch notes and this update has a REALLY long one, therefore I will only mention some of my favorite changes in this update.

Lifespan - Major Update 5 - v0.9

• improved space aesthetics
• better and more music
• story improvements
• screen shake amount settings slider
• crosshair size settings slider
• quality of life improvements
• improved scene transitions
• new player class
• player vessels
• selectable secondary abilities
• stage improvements
• more bosses
• added more player upgrades
• improved player upgrade synergy
• removed some unnecessary upgrades
• win mechanic

I am absolutely in love with this game and loved working on it. As of the 0.9 release there are some known issues for multiplayer only that I hope don't break the game too much:

• upon joining a multiplayer lobby the game might take long to load
• players may not be able to access extra levels while in multiplayer

With all of those notes mentioned that concludes this Lifespan developer log. Realistically, I no longer want to work on Lifespan as the game was originally created when I had little experience with developing a game and, with such, some internal stuff is outdated, poorly designed, or not how I would like it to be, and I'd rather not rewrite everything nor continue to use the old code; however I might drop some hotfixes here and there to cover some unseen bugs and issues.

Thank you for taking time out of your day to read this article, for possibly looking at the game, and for everything.

As always, with love, Pannda (Duck Bear)