Hi everyone,
If all goes to plan then at the end of this week/early next week we should make a preview version of Major Update 1 available on a beta branch. Your testing data and feedback will help us make some final fixes and tweaks ahead of the official release.
One of the biggest differences in the coming update is when you commence your escapes you’ll now be taken to a new menu with several options to choose, and I thought you might find it interesting to know how this is going to work, so this post will focus on this new Launch screen:
As mentioned in our previous Dev Transmissions we see this as providing a strong foundation for us to plug in lots more content in the future. Anyway, you’ve probably noticed a few things in the image so I’ll dive in…
Ship Choice
When you begin your escape you’ll choose which ship class you wish to launch with. These provide modifiers so you have greater flexibility in how you wish to play. You may want to lean into a particular playstyle, or feel like you need assistance in certain areas – there’s a vessel that should satisfy your needs.
The first batch of ships will be more straightforward variants, but as we expand the options throughout Early Access we’ll have increasingly eclectic choices. As we expand the roster of levels, some may be locked to certain ship types.
You’ll acquire new vessels upon achieving objectives. The first ships will be unlocked through successful escapes but we’re looking forward to eventually providing more varied requirements, secret ships and tying in achievements.
Campaign Selection
Campaigns inform the difficulty, the tier of equipment you can discover and the length of an escape run amongst other things. Future campaigns will expand this even further, with some endgame campaigns leaning more heavily into rogue elements.
There’s a broad range of player requirements when it comes to the difficulty in SENTRY, from those who struggle to those that find the game too easy (and everything in between) – so this system is the first step towards catering to those varied requirements.
Major Update 1 launches with a choice of two campaigns. The first is called “Initiate” and is a good place for players to spend time building up their experience. There’ll be hunter ships but no missiles. With all weapons, deployables and gear now divided into tiers, you’ll be unlocking the lower tiers of equipment which will help with a sense of progress and is useful for when you decide to take that step up to harder and longer campaigns.
New profiles will need to complete the tutorial sector, but this will be condensed and slightly easier – we want to get players into the ‘meat’ of the game sooner, and we understand that it could be dispiriting for those who couldn’t get through it.
The second campaign is called “Starfarer” and takes place over three sectors. If you want the higher tiers of equipment you’ll need to tackle this campaign.
Future Major Updates will add increasingly harder campaigns.
Difficulty Levers
With the first version of SENTRY only having one campaign, it meant we couldn’t balance the game toward one end of the difficulty scale without negatively impacting the opposite end, so having a choice of campaigns allows us to address this properly.
There are a lot of different approaches we take to adjust difficulty. Some of these ‘difficulty levers’ we’re pulling are:
- Enemy archetypes – some of the more exotic enemies increase combat difficulty. The prevalence and their appearance timing will be influenced based on campaign choice.
- Enemy tier levels – a lot of enemies have Grunt (grey), Veteran (blue) and Elite (red) versions, so for example you’ll notice Initiate has more occurrences of Grunts than higher difficulties
- Enemy weapons – some enemies carry different weapons. Looking at our soldier enemy, they can be equipped with a pistol, shotgun, burst rifle or assault rifle weapons. Using the Initiate campaign as an example, the prevalence of those stronger weapons would be rarer compared to other difficulties
- Volume of enemies – an obvious one, but we can throw more or less across different campaigns (being mindful of performance of course!)
- Door breaches – Dealing with multiple breaches is harder than a single breach. The Initiate campaign will build up slower to multiple breaches at a time, whereas higher difficulties will hit you harder, sooner.
There’s lots more or course, but they all give us ways to provide necessary variance whilst ensuring fun regardless of campaign choice.
This has massively expanded the amount of work on our single designer Sean and will continue to do so as we add more campaigns, so we had to change the way we implement these. We’ve managed to create a new pipeline that retains the level of handcrafted setup whilst being more efficient to balance across the game.
Hopefully you’ve enjoyed seeing what’s incoming and learning about the reasons behind our approach. We’d really like every escape in SENTRY to feel like a desperate flight, where you limp across the finish line and get a sense of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. We know our first release didn’t nail that for all players enough of the time, so hopefully this new system will improve that, and allow us to continue to improve it in future.
I’ll put up an announcement when the beta branch is available. There are a lot of changes so your feedback will help us improve it for when the official release happens shortly after. Once you get your hands on it, let us know your thoughts!
