Hi everyone, it’s been a very productive month – no time for suffering the January blues! Here’s what we’ve been up to:
The Campaign!
The big focus this month has been continued work on our campaign and how the three layers of the game (Navigator, Overview and the battles) link together. Some highlights include:
- Level health now persists across a run, so if you let enemies slip through, the next time that level is attacked means fewer enemies need to escape
- If a level has been lost, enemies get a free move past it in the Overview. This means they can approach your core much quicker and impacts your choices about where to defend.
- You can repair levels, meaning enemies need to take those levels over again to progress – but this comes at a high resource cost that could be spent on upgrades
- Further improved messaging, such as a picture-in-picture display of chasing vessels/missiles while you’re in the Overview
- Derelicts used to give you a random blueprint, you now get to choose from three types including additional resources if you’d prefer to focus on upgrades rather than new weapons/deployables/abilities
- Victory and Defeat screens that communicate what you’re carrying through to your next run – or in some cases, what you’ve lost
- When you travel through a sector gate, you can now choose to either increase your weapon/deployable slots, or bank any new blueprints you’ve acquired
New After Action Report!
The After Action report is your end of mission debrief screen. We reworked this from the demo to be better suited to the campaign and freeplay modes:
You’re now awarded a S, A, B, C or D grade based on your level performance, as well as displaying information that carries across to the campaign, such as rewards and level health.
Polish!
As we get closer to release, we’re spending more time polishing the build. This is where a lot of the feedback from the demo has been incredibly useful to help us prioritise. A handful of tasks we’ve completed recently are:
- Sprint jumping now has the correct momentum :)
- More camera settings to help with motion sickness
- A swathe of additional actions can now have their key bindings changed
- Doors can now only be opened/closed during the prep phase, but are free to use. Combined with increased health they’re more useful as a delaying tactic
- Scrap that falls out of level is now auto-collected, so you won’t lose anything if some scrap tumbles into a pit!
- Enemies can now attack through the breach forcefields, reducing how overpowered it was to camp the breach points
There’s tons more we’ve done, and an even bigger list for us to work through – but the above points came up a fair few times as feedback so it’s good to get those improvements in.
Playtesting!
We’re back into a serious playtesting phase, so if you fancy getting a sneak preview of the campaign, sign up to our Discord.
We’ve got this weekend’s playtesters sorted, but the plan is to do more playtests every 1-2 weeks and so we’ll be taking in more valiant volunteers during that time.
We love it when we hear from you! We try and respond to every post – but if we don’t please be assured we always read them and take note of feedback and comments! You can reach us on these platforms:
Our primary focus from here till release is improving what’s already in the game, which means February’s Dev Transmission might not necessarily be full of big new features – but it does make the game a much tighter and fun experience.
That said, we are planning on squeezing in at least one more enemy, but we’ll see…
Oh – and we’ll leave the demo up for a while longer. Even though it’s not been updated since early October we’re still getting hundreds of downloads every week so it makes sense for people just discovering SENTRY to get their taster before we release.
Thanks for the support!
