Fulcrum Updates

Version 1.06 - 6.10.2025

There were a few bugs and crashes so this update will hopefully fix them.
We also tweaked a bit of the difficulty a little bit.

• ■ There was a bug where NORMAL was a bit too easy so now its a bit harder.
• ■ We made the scaling more exciting after winning the game at minute 10. It was scaling up too slowly in my opinion.
• ■ But while doing these… we decided to add 3 new difficulty levels!

You can now press UP in the difficulty selection screen to toggle a DANGER MODE ( ! ! ) , which adds roughly 20% more enemies over the default for that level.

Each added difficulty level also has its own HIGHSCORE tracking as well.

I noticed how players had a wide variety of experiences with the difficulty of the game, and we thought it would be nice to have a bit more granularity. If you found HARD too hard, and NORMAL too easy, maybe NORMAL!! will be more fun!

If you want to reset your highscores because of the balance changes, you can do so by opening the menu from the Playdate main screen and selecting:
SETTINGS → GAMES → Fulcrum Defender → Delete Game Data
(NOTE - This will also reset your SKILL LIST collection progress)

How to Update

It should be automatic if you’re connected to WiFi, but if you want to do it manually, you can do so (somehow) within SETTINGS → GAMES of the Playdate’s main menu.
If there's a little “v1.06” in the corner of the main menu like the below gif, you’re up to date!

Version 1.06 title screen

Changes

• ■ WEAPONS
  • ● Changed the BOUNCE 2 upgrade. Instead of splitting into 2 shots when hitting the wall, it instead will return 1 shot that does 2 damage.
    • ▸ This is mostly for performance reasons. Bounce 2 just made too many bullets for the PD to handle.
  
  
• ■ UI
  • ● Added a version number to the main screen.
  • ● Added the DANGER MODE ( ! ! ) difficulties to the difficulty select and highscore screens.
  • ● Changed the pause and gameover score screens to state the difficulty of the current run.
  • ● Shows “MAX LEVEL” instead of “NEXT LEVEL” when you’re max level.
  • ● Added 2 more TIPS and changed some wording of others.


• ■ BALANCE
  • ● Added EASY!!, NORMAL!!, and HARD!! difficulty modes and highscore tracking.
  • ● Made NORMAL mode slightly harder in general.
  • ● Increase the scaling for enemies spawned after 10 and 20 min.
  • ● Increased the number of higher health enemies after 20 min.
  • ● (Sorry about your high scores becoming out of date)

Fixes

• ■ Hopefully solved the crash from too many bullets on screen at 20+ min.
  • ● It will probably still have lower FPS at this point overall, but it should be more consistent and playable at least.
      How are some of y’all so good at this game?
• ■ Put protections against a crash on the title screen relating to “movePlanet”.
• ■ Fixed the bug where you could push enemies infinitely with AUTOGUN, BARRAGE, or ROCKET.
• ■ Fixed a bug where the little dots representing ammo don’t appear after leveling up.
• ■ Fixed a backwards arrow in the UI.

Where did everyone go?