Hi everyone, welcome to the latest Dev Transmission – a monthly roundup of what we’ve been working on.
Adam, Alex and Sean are beavering away on Major Update 1, which is estimated to release at the end of June. There’ll be a preview version posted up on a beta branch in advance for those that want to help test it, we’ll post an announcement when that’s ready.
Anyway, here’s what we’ve been up to in May:
Ship Launch Screen and Campaign Length/Difficulty!
As mentioned last month, this is an important new system for the game that both caters to varying difficulties and provides greater run variety. Because of this, it’s a multi-discipline effort to get the basic feature working, the associated UI to make your choices at the start of an escape and a hell of a lot of balancing to go with it.
On this menu you’ll be choosing which ship you’ll launch with and they provide different modifiers and levels. You’ll also pick which campaign route (aka difficulty) you’ll travel along which influences the amount of sectors you need to escape through, what sort of equipment you can gain along the way (i.e. to get the highest tiers you need to play the harder modes) and other difficulty modifiers.
More vessels and difficulties are unlocked as you play and as we continue throughout Early Access we can expand this with extra ships, campaigns and levels.
New Enemies!
Last month we showed some of the new variants for one of our larger bipedal enemies. Keen-eyed readers may have spotted the cover image showing one of them carrying a large metallic shield. Here’s some concept art of that plus the new ranged weapon they carry:
We’ve also finished a new enemy archetype we’ve not previously talked about this month too, and we’re looking forward to watching you battle it soon :)
The Collective have been monitoring SDP comms traffic and know how much you detest the flying enemies, so are preparing two additional ones to enter the fray:
(Original flyer included at the bottom for reference)
New Equipment!
To counter this, the SENTRY Defense Program has been processing combat data and has prepared a new deployable to deal with those pesky flyers:
It’ll only be able to suck up so many until it jams and needs to purge before it restarts, although this can be improved with upgrades.
Last month we showed a new weapon called the Riot Gun, and we have concept art for another 3-slot weapon to show you that we’ve been working on this month:
Other stuff!
We’ve been chipping away at a whole bunch of miscellaneous tasks from both our own lists and those generated by the community, ranging from some optimisations around visual effects, adding support for status effects to impact the player, polishing the latest new level based on Discord playtest feedback and general bug-fixing, polish and balancing.
From the Community!
In our previous monthly update I finished off with some cool content from the community.
Discord user Jajomba is at it again, with some creative use of the Vortex Grid to create a shortcut in Mess Hall (repurposed into a YouTube Short with his permission): https://youtube.com/shorts/AV3wHaWXvKc?si=_9aMlX7DmwxA43Az
And finally some fan art from Discord user ocddragon. They affectionately refer to these enemies as “Glubbies” and drew one hitching a ride on its larger cousin:
Got some fan art or cool gameplay captures? We love seeing them, so send them to me on Discord or our socials!
We’ve got a big list of your feedback we’re keeping track of and using to improve the game, so keep telling us your thoughts! Even if we don’t respond to every single one, be assured we read them all. You can reach us on all these places:
We’re looking forward to you getting your hands on these latest changes when Major Update 1 launches at the end of June (or sooner if you play the beta branch version) – and we’ve already got a huge list of other cool stuff we want to add in future updates too, for more on that check out the Roadmap here:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1252680/view/5921742839579227575
Thanks for all the support and if you haven’t done so already, please leave a Steam review!
