As we enter in a new year, I wanted to provide an update blog to inform everyone about what to expect from Suit for Hire in 2024.
Our objective is to have Suit for Hire exit Early Access between Q3-Q4 of this year. We will work diligently to meet all the goals and promises that we've made to you, our community.
In the coming months, we'll release significant mechanical overhauls, introduce new content, achievements, and much more. We will delve into the details of what we have planned for v20.0 and the future of the game.
What we're currently working on, v20.0
We've got a lot planned for this next update, primarily big changes to our current mechanics that we believe will improve the overall flow of the game.
What can you expect? Firstly, we plan on adjusting the Willpower system by adjusting how slomo/time-focus is used and the weapon ultimate that currently requires 100% willpower to use. In v20.0 we'll be implementing a new Stamina system, replacing the 3 dodge bars in the corner and instead unifying certain mechanics together, here's a few keypoints that we'll be considering and looking into for the new Stamina system:
Dodges will utilize the Stamina system, consuming a portion of Stamina that will regenerate in a manner similar to the current dodge system.
Sprinting will no longer be an automatic mechanic. This change is intended to prevent players from running away from enemies without any risk. Instead, sprinting will consume the player's stamina.
As sprinting will become a player-controlled mechanic, we will strive to implement new combos and rewards for players to discover, such as stronger punches and kicks following a short sprint. This is to ensure that the mechanic does not feel burdensome to the player.
The Slomo/Time-Focus function will use the player's stamina rather than willpower, enabling players to use slow motion more frequently without being hindered by the Willpower system. This will also allow for more executions.
This will be a significant change, and we value your opinions. We believe that these modifications will enable players to adapt their playstyle without the constraints of the willpower/execution system. However, players will need to be mindful of their stamina usage. We plan to adjust the numbers until they feel just right.
Secondly, alongside the changes to the Slomo/Time-Focus system, we'll move the Weapon Ultimate to its own separate resource, allowing players to use it more frequently. We noticed that players don’t utilize the weapon ultimate since it consumes all willpower, effectively preventing players from executing enemies, which is unfortunate since executions are a crucial part of the gameplay loop.
Ultimates will now consume a unique resource that accumulates over time and with combo kills. When the ultimate bar reaches 100%, players can use the ultimate, which will deplete the ultimate resource.
We anticipate that these changes will permit players to use the slow-motion mechanic more often, and allow weapon ultimates to be used more frequently. We believe these adjustments will greatly benefit the game.
What else? In addition to player mechanic changes, I am planning an overhaul of the enemy AI. Honestly, the AI in Suit for Hire is one of my first attempts at video game AI, and it is evidently flawed and makeshift.
In this update, I intend to rebuild the enemy AI from the ground up, aiming to make them appear more intelligent and equipped with enhanced functionalities to enrich the dynamic gameplay of the game.
The AI adjustments will persist over the next few updates, introducing new abilities to the enemies such as retreating or disarming and frantically searching for a weapon on the ground.
We will share more information regarding this overhaul as we progress.
There are plenty of other improvements and additions in store for v20.0, which we hope you all will appreciate. However, this is only the beginning.
What's after v20.0?
Before we can consider Suit for Hire to be complete, there are quite a few things that we need to finish. Some of the additions in the next few updates will include:
Steam Achievements
4 new Miami chapters
A few other levels and modes like Endless and some challenge levels
Player/Suit customization
More Primary Weapons to choose from
New and Improved Tutorial
Improved auto-aim systems and general gameplay loop improvements
New accessibility settings and customization
Improved/overhauled Counter-attack system
... and more things that we may have missed.
As always, we welcome your thoughts on the upcoming changes we mentioned earlier. We continuously seek feedback to ensure the game is heading in the right direction.
We hope you share our excitement for all the new changes and content on which we'll be working. Our utmost effort will be poured into finally releasing this game out of Early Access. I personally apologize for the delay — no excuses will be made as, at the end of the day, it's our responsibility as developers to deliver to the community.
We anticipate seeing you soon, hopefully with the new v20.0 update. Once again, thank you for your patience and support. Have a fantastic week!
Discuss the game with us and the community on Discord and Twitter. If you want to see the game developed live, catch Crimson on Twitch.
Happy New Year! A new year means new patches (and probably new bugs...), thanks again to everyone that submitted bugs for this patch in particular (@Scott, @Dabt, @legend), if anyone ever has any feedback or bug reports, please let us know!
Without wasting any more of your time, here's the patch notes for v19.5:
FIXED: Certain actions caused the player to swap weapons involuntarily
FIXED: Cathedral boss UI would not disappear after restarting/dying (let me know if this continues to happen, I was not able to personally reproduce it so I put in some duct tape fixes just in case)
FIXED: Player should no longer be able to stand on grenades
FIXED: Player can clip into rocks in the Courtyard Level
FIXED: Player can jump out of bounds on the Club level
FIXED: Fade wall would appear on walls that were unintended (primarily fixed in Shipyard, let me know if other places look weird)
FIXED: Player sometimes can't progress even after killing all enemies in the Cathedral boss room (again, I wasn't able to reproduce so I put some additional checks just in case, but let me know if this occurs again)
FIXED: Swapping from a melee weapon back to gun doesn't show laser, flashlight, and other widgets even when enabled in Settings
FIXED: Melee attacking and then attempting to use a melee weapon would have mismatching combo values causing the player to only target/attach to an enemy but not attack
Thanks to everyone playing/picking up the game and providing your feedback and bug reports, it helps us a ton in improving the game. More to come in 2024, cheers!
Discuss the game with us and the community on Discord and Twitter. If you want to see the game developed live, catch Crimson on Twitch.
We've made some major bugfixes and improvements to the game that should hopefully make things feel better, we also reverted our engine code back to the original code rather than source code which should resolve some other issues.
The full patch notes can be found below:
FIXED: Bright lights in levels like the Subway Level
FIXED: Black fade wall not disappearing in the Club level somehow
FIXED: Enemies keep getting stuck in cover state (this is a duct tape fix for now, we'll be doing a full revamp of the AI in the near future)
FIXED: Weapon selection would load before Game Instance causing weapons that were locked to appear unlocked on first start-up
FIXED: Cathedral boss firing even when the player would start executing an enemy
FIXED: Dive not working near objects and was being set to 'Standing' during dive
FIXED: Secondary weapon execution being used even though primary is equipped
Thanks for all of your feedback and bug reports, keep them coming and Happy New Year!
Discuss the game with us and the community on Discord and Twitter. If you want to see the game developed live, catch Crimson on Twitch.
Super short hotfix of one particular bug happening during countering, kind of a duct tape fix but it should work better now: when the player would tap the counter key, enemies being countered would sometimes teleport far away.
The problem should be fixed or functioning better than before, let us know if there's still any more issues.
Cheers!
Discuss the game with us and the community on Discord and Twitter. If you want to see the game developed live, catch Crimson on Twitch.
We've received quite a bit of feedback and bug reports these past few weeks, we're hoping this patch improves things such as input buffering and more. Kicking, punching, and shooting should now be buffered if you click it near the end of an animation, allowing gameplay to be a bit more smooth. This feature is still pretty experimental so let us know if you experience any bugs or issues with that change in particular.
We've also made more changes, here's the patch list:
IMPROVEMENT: Added input buffering for shooting and kicking (needs feedback, let us know if you encounter any issues!)
MUSIC: New boss music track in the Cathedral area
MUSIC: Improved and revamped Art Exhibit music including boss area
UI: Changed "Reset Level" in the pause menu to "Reset to Last Checkpoint"
BUGFIX: Negative accuracy bug, most likely due to shotguns
BUGFIX: Death penalty showing up on a full chapter reset
BUGFIX: Throwing a weapon while diving caused the dive to stay stuck proning (also let us know if you ever get stuck while diving, I'll attempt to make more fixes)
BUGFIX: Character playing 'get up' animation if releasing dive at the perfect time
Thanks for all the feedback and bug reports everyone, Happy Holidays!
Discuss the game with us and the community on Discord and Twitter. If you want to see the game developed live, catch Crimson on Twitch.
We've been working hard on improving the game and adding mechanics that give players more control over their Suit and the flow of actions.
In the past month or so, we worked hard on adding a much needed mechanic, weapon swapping- the ability to switch between your secondary and primary without having to throw away your secondary weapon.
This mechanic alone enables so much dynamic gunplay/style that I believe many of you will enjoy replaying the game with this added feature.
On top of this new mechanic, we also received your feedback on other parts of the game and have applied some fixes, improvements, and balances to bossfights- full list below:
IMPROVEMENT: Non lootable weapons will no longer drop from enemies
IMPROVEMENT: Weapon pickup square UI will disappear at a distance
IMPROVEMENT: levels now have puddles (graphics galore)
IMPROVEMENT: Items will now be grayed out if the player already has it (armor/ammo)
AUDIO: Adjusted attenuation on vehicles to reduce music being muddied
BALANCE: Enemies piled up at the center boss-arena in Art Exhibit, they now get deleted when entering the boss-arena
BALANCE: Reduced enemy spawns in Art Exhibit final fight
BUGFIX: Throwing a weapon at an auto-aimed enemy throws the weapon at the ground
BUGFIX: Fixed issue with melee weapons hitting invisible overlap boxes
BUGFIX: Enemies can trigger slowmo on doors they open
BUGFIX: Bug where the underground key stayed/duplicated in the inventory on Cathedral
BUGFIX: Single bullet drops not adding to Revolver reserve
BUGFIX: Finishing a chapter with an empty weapon causes inability to fire in the next chapter
BUGFIX: Player can't throw a weapon (or do certain actions) until dodge rolling
BUGFIX: Shotgun shooting from different points rather than one initial location
BUGFIX: Enemies that drop a bullet cause a 'flow issue' on execution
BUGFIX: Double death screen in the Art Exhibit circular area
BUGFIX: Fixed occlusion (again) on the walls in the Cathedral (should work now... hopefully)
BUGFIX: Crashes should be reduced (for real this time)
BUGFIX: Main Menu windows shouldn't clip into each other on smaller resolutions (e.g. Steamdeck)
If we missed any of your feedback, please let us know!
Thank you for all of the support these past few months, and a big thank you to everyone who submitted feedback, bug reports, and suggestions leading up to this update. Please send us more so we can make future patches/updates great!
Discuss the game with us and the community on Discord and Twitter. If you want to see the game developed live, catch Crimson on Twitch.
Hey everyone, apologies for the wait on this patch, it would appear there was some major bugs stopping players from proceeding in the Miami series, but I believe I've fixed a few of them, details below:
Fixed: Continue button not working/not focusing on controller on contract completion
Fixed: Cathedral boss respawning outside of the level bounds
Fixed: Player Character not spawning in the Shipyard level (causing the camera to be in the ground frozen, etc.)
Again, huge apologies for the above bugs, the engine update must've had some bugs that I didn't catch sooner- thank you to everyone who submitted bugs and feedback thus far!
Discuss the game with us and the community on Discord and Twitter. If you want to see the game developed live, catch Crimson on Twitch.
Hey everyone, we released a hotfix patch on some issues that seemed to stop players from progressing after the Cathedral boss, alongside other fixes and improvements:
Added: Dialogue text after Cathedral 'Boss on the Block' is killed indicating that remaining enemies need to be killed
Fixed: Collision on broken window in the Cathedral
Fixed: Level not clearing after killing all enemies in Cathedral boss room
Fixed: Cathedral boss spawning basic enemies after death
Improved lighting and visuals for various levels
Thank you to everyone that submitted bugs and feedback, we'll continue to get work done.
Discuss the game with us and the community on Discord and Twitter. If you want to see the game developed live, catch Crimson on Twitch.
