Hi everyone,
Our main priority in March has been working on what we’re considering to be the headline feature of Major Update 3. While we won’t spoil the details now, the idea of this addition would be to provide much greater variety when playing campaigns.
How we present this new feature ended up combining with some other areas we’ve been working on, such as showing more information in the Deploy box (like threat levels, enemies in that boarding party etc.) as well as our plans for later in Early Access (adding a Crew Menu and Codex) so we took the opportunity to rework the menus so that it accommodates all these changes and future ideas. That has been quite time consuming, however it means that they should all be more intuitive. The danger with Early Access is that sometimes you can keep bolting on features to the user interface and it becomes a poor experience to use, so we wanted to avoid falling into that trap. It's shaping up quite nicely!
Here’s what else we’ve been up to this month:
New Weapons/Gear!
Major Update 2 was very code heavy, so while Adam was focusing on that Sean and Alex were laying the groundwork for future content creation. Now various dependencies have been freed up we’re going through and implementing some of these queued up assets – those who have followed previous Dev Transmissions may remember seeing concept art for some of these:
Melee weapons are 1-slot, so while they have limitations they still conform to the general rule in SENTRY; that any weapon should feel good to use and be perfectly viable for certain situations.
The HF Blade stores a number of charges that can be expended on ranged attacks, while the Stun Stick becomes more powerful when it’s fully charged – which can only be accomplished by smashing props or enemies. You can also choose to unleash this charge in an explosive secondary attack.
We’ve also introduced the Shuriken as a new Gear item. When thrown, this bounces to nearby enemies – something that can be increased as you upgrade it.
On the subject of gear, we’ve moved the Jump Jets to be a permanent player ability so you can now double-jump all the time (we’ve also made the double-jump more reliable, so it feels like you’d expect it to). This leaves the number of passive gear items quite low, but is in advance of a change we’ll likely make after MU3 to how passive items are assigned to crew.
New Levels!
We’ve got two new levels that should imminently be going out to our Discord Playtesters: Junction and Thermal Vats.
The former has echoes of Hallway, in that it is compact with some short distances between the breach points and exit, so can be quite intense when facing larger forces. The main corridor is wide and a natural defense point for 3 out of the 5 breaches, but it’s split in the middle so can present a challenge!
Junction is partially built on a layout we created very early on in development, so it’s been great to revisit it. This area appeared in some of our earliest (and now nuked) screenshots on the store page.
Thermal Vats has several areas of molten metals scattered around the level, ideal for using Conveyors or the Vortex Glove to push enemies into :)
From the Community!
This month Discord member TheCartoon1st has created an image of them and their friend playing co-op together:
We absolutely love seeing this stuff, so keep sending anything cool to us!
Keep giving feedback via our channels below – we try to respond as much as we can, but even if we don’t personally reply we read and note everything. Here’s a bunch of links to where we can be reached:
Thanks for your continued support!
