Kinda took the week off of development but I have a few important fixes.
Fixed several bugs associated with autohackers. This skill was basically unusably broken. Autohackers will no longer attack you when summoned, and can be hacked properly without breaking your terminal.
Fixed a bug where hackers would sometimes become frozen after destroying their target.
Reduced the size of ripples in water environments.
0.7 Hotfix
Fixed a bug causing breakable walls to be placed down incorrectly in generated missions.
You can make toilets explode now! This was working before I just forgot to include it in the patch notes.
0.7 Update - Generated Missions Update
Hellooo Agents (✿◕‿◕)
Today's update features some lovely artwork from Emett! Go check out their work!
A special thanks to everyone who left a review this week. Be sure to join the discord if you wanna leave feedback, or see cool pictures of frogs!
This update features a rework for the BBS side contracts. The goal was to make these missions more fun and interesting, and balance them better to fit with the difficulty curve of the main story. This system is also flexible enough to generate missions for the future roguelike mode.
I'll also be writing a little development update underneath the patch notes for those of you interested.
Here are da notes.
Missions BBS Rework!
Created the new "kit" generation system for levels. Layouts are more interesting.
BBS missions now support locked doors. This wasn't possible previously because I couldn't guarantee that everywhere in the level was accessible with the old system. There may be some edge cases where this causes problems so be sure to lemme know if u see that happening!
BBS missions can now feature tons of computers from the campaign.
BBS missions can now generate with different sizes.
Added pretty new floor shaders to spice up the visual variety.
Missions can now be selected based off of size and enemy level. Contracts can still spawn with small sizes in the late game if you just want a quick little mission to do.
Enemy equipment is now featured in mission selection independent of the mission modifier. You'll be fighting a much more diverse selection of enemies.
New "Collect" Mission type. A fairly simple mode that requires you to pick up keycards scattered around the level. Perfect for speedy agents.
Added lots of new modifiers, modifiers become more common as mission level increases. Special modifiers unlock as you complete missions in the story.
Added a new layered noise system. This creates slightly more interesting visual effects as a backdrop to missions past level 3.
Added some new B-sides to the BBS soundtrack. Mission themes can now appear in BBS missions after completing the corresponding mission.
Added some checks to prevent objectives from spawning literally right next to the player's spawn.
I have more updates planned for side contracts, but this is a huge improvement over the old system imo and I think feedback is necessary before going further.
Other Changes
Added THISBOYB to the musical guest credits. Apologies for forgetting this! Go check out their soundcloud.
Many particle effects, such as blood, sparks, and landmine bits now bounce off walls. Looks cool B)
Enemy pathfinding now understands the concept of "diagonal," meaning enemies can get across the map quicker and look more natural doing so. Look out!
Black Knight Update! These babies felt kinda unfair since they were given continuous sight of the player after landing. Now knights will move to defend points of interest on the map after landing, including the player's position for one time only. However, drop pods now carry 1 extra knight, and knights come equipped with an ability, oh no!
the_dog now uses the bypass hacking attack
Massively buffed auto hacker turrets. These things used to guarantee die in one hit, now they have health levels somewhere between an humanoid and a standard turret.
Many melee based abilities automatically swap the user to melee mode if not there already.
Added like 15 new skeleton sprites.
Buffed the Deepfake ability to have 9 charges. It's still kind of a weak ability, so I'll look into updating it in the future.
Enemies using melee can now sprint to close larger gaps while in combat.
the_dog no longer appears in a certain mirror past a certain story mission.
lots of small fixes, mostly visual bugs, and things in levels not rendering in the proper order.
Fixed some typos in dialogue, and altered a line from an obscure guest at a party to eliminate absurdly stupid lore implications.
Development Update
Finally, I wanted to update everyone on the state of development. DDS had a planned Early Access period of 6 months, and has been in early access for...5 months? (;*_*)
So...the game isn't anywhere near complete. There are a couple of reasons that, some of which I can work to correct. My life has been very busy lately as I wrap up my degree and look for an actual job. This issue hopefully resolve itself in the next couple months. A lot of my dev time has been spent on bug fixes, and minor updates. While these definitely seem to be appreciated, they get in the way of completing substantial chunks of side-story content. I might take a break to just work on long term goals for a while once the next round of feedback is in. Speaking of which, the new side quest has been seriously kicking my butt! Some features are just really annoying to get working and make fun, and the story has been giving me some trouble too. At this point it's about 2/3rds complete and I'm going to be scoping it down slightly so I can complete the stupid thing in a reasonable amount of time. Another issue is that I haven't set proper deadlines for myself with everything going on. I'm gonna aim to have a strict deadline for the next sidequest by the end of this week.
All in all, DDS is gonna be in early access for a while longer than I wanted. I'm sorry that I won't be able to live up to my original promise of getting to 1.0 in 6 months. I promise to keep working and releasing updates until we reach 1.0. I don't wanna turn into one of those early access devs who never finishes their project, both so I can deliver the full thing to you and so I can get working on other games!
Thank you all for the continued feedback and support. Working on this is a pleasure and I believe DDS is a much better game now than when it initially launched thanks to all of you.
See you again soon for more fun!
The Post-Sex Update
Howdy Agents (✿◕‿◕)
April Fools is now over! Thank you to everyone who left a review during the event, and as always, join the discord!
If you didn't have a chance to play during the event and claim ur pet rat, you can still unlock them by typing "have_sex_" into your terminal. I might find a way to tie this ability organically into the game some day, but for now you'll have to use a cheat code.
A few additional things were added in the sex update, but were left out of the patch notes for comedic effect.
Patch Notes
Huge new optimizations to saving and loading. Changing levels should feel noticeably snappier. This unfortunately came with lots of bugs. I haven't run into one in quite a long time but beware of lingering buginess while I continue testing.
Enemies can now sprint when repositioning with a melee weapon.
Fixed a bug that caused enemies moving with melee weapons to travel slower than their actual skeleton speed.
Fixed a bug causing the rain in Duvet's apartment to not render.
The Become Succ perk now replaces all your abilities with Kiss X. This perk was originally designed when you had to pay chiplets to unequip them (what a wild idea that was!). This new version now feels like it has an appropriate upside and downside.
Disabling the communication hub should no longer disable the camera hub. This was a weird implicit rule that I didn't like. Com hub only blocks enemies from radioing each other now.
In other news, the Mission BBS rework is almost complete! I'm hoping to have that done by the end of this week.
The current BBS system has a lot of issues, like how all levels are basically the same size and kind of samey outside of 2 variants. The new system will scale the size of levels as you progress through the story, introduce more combinations of effects, and feature a slightly reworked black knights system. It's shaping up to be a nice little update that'll elevate the quality of random missions to be more in line with the rest of the game. This will finally tick us over into version 0.7 as well! I have a lot more to share about the development schedule but I'll save that for next time.
The Post April Fools Update
Howdy Agents (✿◕‿◕)
April Fools is now over! Thank you to everyone who left a review during the event, and as always, join the discord!
If you didn't have a chance to play during the event and claim ur pet rat, you can still unlock them by typing "have_sex_" into your terminal. I might find a way to tie this ability organically into the game some day, but for now you'll have to use a cheat code.
A few additional things were added in the sex update, but were left out of the patch notes for comedic effect.
Patch Notes
Huge new optimizations to saving and loading. Changing levels should feel noticeably snappier. This unfortunately came with lots of bugs. I haven't run into one in quite a long time but beware of lingering buginess while I continue testing.
Enemies can now sprint when repositioning with a melee weapon.
Fixed a bug that caused enemies moving with melee weapons to travel slower than their actual skeleton speed.
Fixed a bug causing the rain in Duvet's apartment to not render.
The Become Succ perk now replaces all your abilities with Kiss X. This perk was originally designed when you had to pay chiplets to unequip them (what a wild idea that was!). This new version now feels like it has an appropriate upside and downside.
Disabling the communication hub should no longer disable the camera hub. This was a weird implicit rule that I didn't like. Com hub only blocks enemies from radioing each other now.
In other news, the Mission BBS rework is almost complete! I'm hoping to have that done by the end of this week.
The current BBS system has a lot of issues, like how all levels are basically the same size and kind of samey outside of 2 variants. The new system will scale the size of levels as you progress through the story, introduce more combinations of effects, and feature a slightly reworked black knights system. It's shaping up to be a nice little update that'll elevate the quality of random missions to be more in line with the rest of the game. This will finally tick us over into version 0.7 as well! I have a lot more to share about the development schedule but I'll save that for next time.
Sex Update Hotfix
Patch Notes
Fixed a rare but dangerous bug where players could be locked out of the ability menu when rolling a particular ability from the jester vocation.
Sex Update
Patch Notes
added sex
0.6.9 Update
Howdy Agents (✿◕‿◕)
Got another little update for you. If you haven't noticed, DDS is 25% off! So...go tell a friend I guess (•ิ_•ิ)? If you're a new to the DDS cool club, then u should join the discord!
DDS has almost made it to 250 reviews! That's halfway to the delicious 500 review milestone where we might get updated to "Overwhelmingly Positive" :O Thank you so much to everyone who left a review!
I wanted to provide a progress update while you're here. My life is super busy with job applications and finishing my degree, so the new sidequest is gonna take a while. I've only got two more missions to make, but they're both extremely complex :<
Don't worry though, a substantial update is on the horizon in the form of the Missions BBS rework! As one user pointed out, the randomly generated missions in DDS feel way more "random" than "generated right now. I've written some hot n' fresh level generation code that fixes almost all of the problems I have with the current system, so look forward to seeing that in the near future!
Anyways, here are da notes.
Added a new difficulty option. You can now increase the time it takes enemies to hack you up to 10x!
Fixed a bug that caused your terminal to break when using one of the teleporters in the prison break mission. This happened when teleporters had no destination set. I've added a check so that this won't break the game anymore.
Added some new floors in the final climb sequence. Been making a lot of new floorset shaders lately to improve the look of DDS overall.
Fixed some errors in the wiki page for Ammo Types.
Fixed the warning line and darkness line shaders to remove weird artifacts on higher resolutions.
Fixed several typos in email messages.
Autocomplete now works for the mega_hacker computer in the Duvet questline.
Yet Another Smol Update
Hey Agents (✿◕‿◕)
Here again with another small update. This one features some fanart from SrslyTrash! Go check out their twitch n' twitter.
New Ability for Gunmeister, Pirate Latitudes. Hold out three guns in front of you and shoot them all. ker blam
Made it so weapon buffs and mobile shields now spawn on ALL guns you're wielding as a result of the new skill and guns akimbo.
Fixed a bug where pick style weapons could maintain an active hitbox after being swung
Added a new page to the wiki briefly explaining ammo types
Smol Update
Howdy Agents! (✿◕‿◕)
This is a very small update with a few bug fixes and an ultra niche feature that a few of you have requested. Thank you to everyone who has kept up with the project and a special thanks to everyone who left a review!
You can now downgrade items in your armory for free. This is for agents who use builds centered on self-damaging and need to reduce the intensity of their equipment in the lategame when it disappears from the shop.
Prison hub computer in the rescue mission now displays properly on network graph
fixed a typo in one of the error messages you get in the prison break level
deluge mode no longer despawns your mounted guns
fixed a visual bug where full stack enemies had their melee weapons drawn by default in addition to their guns
adjusted colors of buttons in the abilities menu so they don't turn white when you hover over them
fixed a bug preventing the player from switching between some legendary weapons in their armory
There is another bug found recently involving pick style weapons that makes their hitbox stay active even when the attack completes, but this happens vary vary rarely when I try to test for it so I haven't been able to fix it :<
Anyways that's all. My life is busy busy rn and dev time is still being directed towards the new sidequest, so don't expect too many big changes for a while!
