I've started working on this update by fleshing out the expanded design for the labs areas. At that point, labs were not much different from other locations, civilians and security, and one lab holding the event goal for timeline progression, the -REDACTED-, of course. There are three parts that I wanted to expand the labs in, these are adding the unique art and location generator, the unique optional gameplay with rewards and unique required gameplay for timeline. After I was done with sketching out the design, I realized that each of these has enough work in it to keep me busy for the amount of time I usually reserve for a single update. To make matters worse, I fell sick with cold for a week or so (in the middle of the hot summer, I know, but drinking much cold beverages daily does that easily for me). So I started work on the first part - the generator and finding unique art. iwanPlays supported me earlier with scientist tiles.
So after some weeks of work I got the basis of the new "buildings with indoors" generator working that will be used for locations like this. Actual windows, tables and doors are there. The clue spawning was revisited, too, the clues have more art in there and they spawn only on tables. Also labs have floor drains, the larger of these the parasite can use to get into the sewers if needed. The generator was slow enough in coming and after I was mostly done with it, my vacation came up. It'll take three weeks and I'll try working but it's unlikely that I will get much done (I intend to start writing ingame encyclopedia). I didn't want to keep the game without any updates for another month so I'm making an intermediate labs update with the intent on following with more. Hope you'll like the new look.
Note: I'm not fully confident that all savegames from the previous versions will load correctly, there could be potential cases where the game might not be completable due to the labs changes.
Changes:
Facility (labs) generation
New clue spawning in labs
Readables (clues) in labs can be grabbed when near them
Team members now look appropriately for the area
Host turns left to live number is now shown in the HUD (takes into account evolution, body features growing if they're active, assimilation and other variables).
In-world sounds volume is now modulated by distance to player
Probe brain action is now colored if it will give you clues or skills
Probe brain action is now repeatable through Shift key modifier. Repeating works only until all clues and skills have been learned (or until the host dies). If the host brain holds nothing of interest, the action will not repeat.
Added tutorial hints about communications and host degradation
Reduced maximum energy loss on habitat destruction on easy group difficulty
Key shortcuts display styles updated to be consistent across the HUD and all windows
Habitats left number will be hidden until you get the improvement
Fixes:
Savegame loading fix for AI items and skills
Loading fix for arrays like known items/objects
Human AI names are now saved
Hopefully the last ghost objects fix (ghost objects are the ones that you can sometimes see in the upper left corner of the game window)
v0.10
The focus of this update is on a long overdue writing for the improvement texts. I think the placeholder improvement names are from... 2019? 2018? I don't remember. Anyway, the improvements were also in need of rebalancing, since there were clear winners and a lot of very clear losers. In general, not a single one was nerfed, but some were buffed to improve their usability. Any attacks now have a consistent energy spend between them. Firearms still have a clear advantage once you get the relevant skill up for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the ammo isn't there yet (it will be at some point). And secondly, the basic improvements set is not designed to be combat-competitive, all of these are to improve your survival chance while you're running away. The combat set of improvements and aggressive playstyle support is incoming in the future but I've no date to give you.
There are a few interesting additions to the improvements section. Neurotoxin projectiles (previously paralysis spit) now has a small instakill chance to differentiate it from the slime spit (which is now called mucilaginous fluid, cheers if you can say it fast three times in a row). But the most interesting addition is for the decay accelerant improvement. I recall how I painfully researched some biology to come up with a good description, spent some time working on the body despawn implementation and raising the alertness/group interest from it, and in the end it was all made obsolete by the fact that the player can go drop a body in the sewers. First I wanted to remove it altogether but I came up with an idea that it could give you a healing item. At this point in the development, it's the only way you can stock up on heals (and the only way to heal a host) so the improvement now has good value IMO since the body feature is also pretty cheap to grow and made even cheaper.
While iterating on the improvements I've realized that it was a good time to implement some needed restrictions. The amount of body features on a single host is now limited by the constitution. The amount of inventory items by the strength stat and you get bonuses from assimilation. I've also noticed another glaring hole in the design and now each attack will require a small amount of energy. The firearms are still deadly (and they should be) but this is a limitation for the future.
Now the final change that I want to address separately is called early invasion. I've received a suggestion that there is an unwinnable state in the game and on how to give the player a chance in that case. Since the parasite requires at least 30 energy to harden the grip and invade the host, if it has less than that number, it's a dead, erm, creature, uh, slithering. So upon thinking I've implemented a new action, called "early invasion". If the parasite is attached to the host and its energy is low, this action appears in the list. It allows you to invade the host "early" while its not fully subdued. There are two caveats: first, it has a chance to succeed which is dependent on the grip amount (basically grip is a percentage chance) with modifications according to the survival difficulty setting. And secondly, every attempt costs life for the parasite. A failed attempt costs more. This way if the player manages to find a host while dying, they now have a few final desperate attempts before dying. Hope you like it :)
Well, that's all I've got to say, now I can work on adding some new content to the game. Have fun!
Improvements changes:
??Host energy bonus -> Adipose tissue layer
??Acid spit -> Gastric hypersecretion - damage increased, energy lowered
??Slime spit -> Mucilaginous fluid - energy lowered
??Paralysis spit -> Neurotoxin projectiles - small instakill chance added (depends on the amount of armor on the target)
Decay acceleration will now spawn a cookie delicious nutrients item that can restore host health and energy, cysts body feature grow cost reduced
Assimilation/Watcher molds growth cost reduced
Antibody generators health bonus increased
Mucus from the mucilaginous fluid improvement now has AI status icon
Microvascular networks now give more strength
Changes:
Early invasion mechanic
Maximum amount of body features is now limited by host constitution. Assimilated hosts can have 2 more body features
Maximum amount of inventory items is now limited by host strength. Same, +2 items for assimilated hosts
Each attack will now require a small amount of energy to spend. Since assimilated hosts do not have a passive energy decrease, this amount will be smaller due to that
Raised initial team distance to give the player a few more turns of relative calm
Tutorial can now be skipped via the options. Note that you also have to set the overall difficulty to some value. The game treats the skip as if 200 turns have passed from the start
Player info in the HUD will now be additionally animated when the parasite is without a host and has low energy
Game window now has a minimal size
Fixes:
Savegame loading fix
v0.9.2
Fix for region mode exception after the ambush destroys a habitat with a watcher
v0.9.1
Fix for invisible civilians
Two fixes for savegames
v0.9
When I started working on this update, my initial plan was to make save/load support and then move on to the basic evolution rebalance. Unfortunately, that was not meant to be. I knew that savegame support was a serious task but it turned out it was even more serious then I thought. Without going into too much technical details, my favorite highly dynamic method of programming does not gel well with serialization/deserialization (in fact I will have to keep that in mind in the future). The saving wasn't that hard but restoring the correct state after loading the game was a much harder task. In the end I've had to rewrite chunks of low/mid-level code to make the game state serializable and properly restorable so I fully expect there to be savegame related bugs. iwanPlays helped a lot with the QA so it seems stable enough but there's just a myriad of possibilities some of which may result in the game not loading correctly. If you notice any bugs after you've loaded the game, please send the exceptions.txt file and the savegame itself to me with the description because we all love these broken savegames, do we? :)
Anyway, following my general philosophy on this game, saving has an associated difficulty. That's right, you've read me correctly, easy difficulty allows the player up to 10 saves per game in any point, normal only up to 3 and you can only save in the sewers, while hard difficulty limits you to a single save total, also only in the sewers. Bonus points to you if these numbers - 10/3/1 seem familiar... Speaking of difficulty, now you can select overall difficulty in the options menu and the game will automatically choose it for you when necessary.
At this point you're probably wondering, what's this spoon mode that was mentioned earlier? Well, it's the result of a short discussion on the Steam forums with the players. The game is brutally hard for some and they want to relax some of the gameplay restrictions just to have some fun. This would, of course, break the balance so I've decided to add a hidden options menu where you can enable these changes in the game. It's hidden mostly because the new players are not supposed to enable anything in it right from the start. After enabling any of the two flags, the game gets officially spooned and you will have to disable the flags and start a new one to play like you're supposed to again. To get into the spoon mode options, you need to click on the OPTIONS menu title letters to form the word SPOON. At this point the hidden menu opens. There are only two options there now but I encourage you to ask for more on the forums. If it's not too hard or problematic, I'll implement it.
That's all I have for now.
Changes:
Save/load games support with a difficulty setting
Steam overlay should work now, at least on Windows. Untested on Linux
All NPCs now have fixed art chosen on game start. Before they've regenerated every time they've spawned (and noone noticed!)
Easy evolution difficulty starting improvements reduced to 2
Hard survival difficulty setting now disables the rescue dog
New icons for female cops, courtesy of iwanPlays
New icons for kevlar armored and fully armored blackops, courtesy of iwanPlays (now you can distinguish between the two visually)
Random delay introduced in sound playing, hopefully reducing the problems when a lot of AIs shoot at the same time
Overall difficulty setting in the options
Super-secret spoon mode
No energy loss on habitat death, habitat maximum count does not decrease
Open all basic mutations at start
Fixes:
Sound should no logger stop in long sessions
v0.8
There are no gameplay changes in this one but a lot of maintenance stuff that should make playing the game more comfortable. The one small feature I'm most proud of is that you can now shift-click or shift-press number to auto-repeat harden grip and reinforce control actions. Players brought their inherent spamminess which made them a source of mistakes to my attention. Sound and music subsystem was changed, that will increase the sound quality and also restore the remaining three music tracks that I did earlier. Sound/music will require another pass at some point in the future. More sound effects are needed, the ambience should be enriched and my music mixing skills are now significantly better than they were in 2019 (as in I had almost none, hehehehehe) so I want to redo all of these music tracks and start working on the new ones.
UI had two big changes. Firstly, there is now the main menu that the game starts with. Options window and quit menu items are now in there and these buttons are no longer in the HUD. Options window was expanded with the advanced section which features some useful and interesting flags. I've also fixed more bugs in the body/evolution window that I missed earlier. Check out the full details below, there is smaller but important stuff there, too. More players have asked about the save system so this will be incoming in the next big update, please wait a little longer :)
Oh yeah, the Linux version should now be working.
Changes:
Linux version is up
Sound/music subsystem replaced which coincidentally also increases sound samples quality and restores 3 additional music tracks.
Pressing shift-click or shift+number will now auto-repeat two common actions that need spamming with the short delay between them. In case of harden grip the action will be repeated until hold is 100, in case of reinforce control until control is 90. This is made into a setting just in case, tell me what do you think of it. Path delay is renamed to repeat delay and will now control both the mouse path movement and this.
Main menu added. Options and quit access moved to the main menu. F6, F10 shortcuts will continue to work but the HUD buttons were removed. Non-working save game menu item added to troll the players remind me that I need to implement the save system. The game will now show the main menu at start.
Options window added advanced options:
Amount of log lines visible in HUD
Center camera on player near map edges - was the current behavior since 0.7.1 and can now be disabled
Laptop movement keys (uiojklm,.)
Extended gameplay information - this one exposes some of the stuff and math happening under the hood if you're interested in deeper knowledge of the game
Shift-click/number repeats the action until the logical end
Fullscreen added to options and made more robust (ESC button will no longer exit fullscreen mode), F shortcut disabled
Goal window will show current society knowledge for the tutorial goal that requires it
When the player steps on biomineral formation, the log will explain the habitat energy produced and consumed. Also it'll show how much energy/health will be restored by it.
Alert log messages are now subtly animated to grab attention (I'll also add a sound effect once I do the sound effects pass).
Easy/normal group difficulty will now show alert message dialog when the team is close.
New "radio" state icon added when human AI tries to call for help
Restart game when the game is over is now a clickable action
HUD menu buttons will now be highlighted when they appear first during the tutorial
Fixes:
UI fixes for body and evolution windows (phew, that should be the end of it. right? right?...)
Find a clue tutorial goal text changed to explain that any clue will suffice.
Close button returned to document window.
Fix for waiting with mouse click in region mode.
v0.7.2
mouse-related exceptions fixes
mouse path will now correcly disappear/restore when mouse is over/out of the unwalkable tile
v0.7.1
This is a release focused on bugfixes with some changes to the difficulty settings. There is a new difficulty selection called survival. Important bugs with habitats dying multiple times and too many AIs on screen on high resolutions were fixed. Many visual bugs for UI windows were fixed, too. The game now has correct mouse cursors.
Changes:
New difficulty setting - survival. ATM it makes the AI calling the law slower on easy setting and makes the calls interrupt when the parasite attaches to host. Normal and hard settings behave as previously.
Evolution difficulty - slower host degradation when evolving on easy/normal setting. The current speed becomes hard setting.
Evolution difficulty - now limits total amount of habitats per game. This number is visible in skills section of body window. Note that this number is decreased only when habitat is destroyed. When the last habitat is destroyed, the parasite dies.
Group difficulty - more severe penalties for habitat destruction on hard, and less severe on easy setting.
New formula for calculating max ai number on screen - the number is significantly lower for high resolutions and a little bit higher for low resolutions
Console command for ai stats (dai)
i1, b1 hotkeys were replaced with ctrl-1, shift-1 (old ones still available)
Camera is now always centered (added config option for it, will add later to the options window)
Uncaught exceptions are now logged and message about it was added to contact me
Initial team timeout raised making the early game easier
Fixes:
lots of UI fixes for low resolutions
fix for one habitat being destroyed multiple times
fixes for azerty keyboards
mouse cursors fixed
HUD toggling will be faster
most of the visual bugs for borders fixed
optional goals are now marked as such
added bridge goal between main line and scenario
arrow keys movement fixed
disabled the ability for dogs to pick items up
you cannot leave the habitat when the host is paralyzed now
disabled inventory action hotkeys when inventory is not yet available
automatic game over when the parasite has no energy and is attached to host
actions count made smaller in the HUD
evolution-related lines are removed from the HUD when there is no evolution happening
v0.7 - The first Steam release
This is the first release that is available to Steam players (pre-release at the moment of writing). The major focus has been on changing the underlying platform for easier development and on making the UI prettier.
all HUD and windows UI elements converted to new system with background art added;
full UI mouse support finally completed;
previous inventory, knowledge and body windows have been merged into one "body" window with multiple toggleable segments;
bitmapped font changed to vector;
many small bugfixes and tweaks due to these changes;
