Hello, all nooters!
It's been a bit silent from our part for the past month, but for a pretty good reason. We've had a lot of progress, and made several reworks. The whole idea of the Blueprint Update is to take Penguin Heist out of the "Early Access era" and finally implement a lot of features we want to keep for the full release. This has means tearing apart things and redoing them from scratch. The good thing will be that the game will look and feel much better, but it has taken its time. We've still got a lot we want to add before the full release, but this is a big step on the way there.
Alright, what's new then? Well, to start off, we have more than 100 quests of different types in completely reworked environments. The art direction of the maps is more coherent and related to the story, at the same time as all maps have been expanded. We've also added things like body armor that can be depleted and respawns, and a lot more.
What Will Be New
- A bunch of Blueprint quests that will reward you with new weapons and items upon completion
- New progression system
- Massively improved and expanded maps, up to 4 times larger with hidden locations and quests
- Body armor that can be destroyed
- Post Office where you can spend your Penguin Stamps and later build your village and house
- Library, where you can buy information about Blueprints and later on do research and collect lore
- Player respawn areas and checkpoints (no more restarting everything if you die)
- Progress bar for reloading and other interactions
- Improved AI, so generally less stupid
- Better lighting for dynamic objects
- More than 1 hour of soundtrack (and more to come later on)
- Realtime modification of penguin size, so shrinking and enlarging
- More populated maps, so way fewer areas with nothing of interest
- Added the groundwork for the lore in the environments
- Better controller support (possibly Steam Deck compatible soon)
- Several new weapons, items, and clothes
- Overhaul of bosses, so they now have their own special moves
- Overhaul of survival with new Pongie types
- Revised UI
- Much better CPU and GPU perfromance (like 60% reduction of usage)
- And much more!
You can tell it's quite a bit, and we want to get everything done before releasing the update. After that, the updates will come more often again, with the other features we've been talking about. New maps are also being prepared for after blueprints come out, including a big city map, wild west map, and a map mixing East Asian styles. A lot of the work has been in the background, though, setting up all of the new systems so that we can add future features much quicker.
Some Screenshots
Completely reworked jungle for Military Base
A dark secret is hiding beyond the jungles of the Military Base
King Pingnar Mines have gotten a makeover with colors consistent with the lore
A town in the forests outside King Pingnar Mines
What Happens Now?
Now we're just working as hard as we can on getting the update out, which we hope will be at the end of this month. When the update is done and ready for testing, we'll let you know that it's going to be released soon. We're also making a few new trailers for the game, as well as updating the Steam page screenshots and art to better show the game as it is now.
This will be the biggest update since we released the game in Early Access, so we want to take our time to make sure it won't be ridden with bugs. If you have any questions, comments, or just want to say hello, we're always here to respond! We hope you're enjoying the game this far, and we think that this update will take everything to a new level.
We'll see you later when the update is ready to drop!
Stay safe, and keep nooting away!