Good News Everyone!
We spent the last month collecting your feedback and building the major update 2-14 to spice up your journey in RECONNECT. Meanwhile, people around us celebrating football, ice-cream and cold water to enjoy the summer, but not for us.. With our boiling heads and CPUs, we heated up the evolving summer even more, play tested hundreds of hours abstruse game-configurations, generated a faster/harder starting-gameplay and rethink the overall gameloop. A bunch of lifestreams, articles and early access-players over the past weeks inspired our work to adjust the right things in RECONNECT for an even smoother user-experience.
So, what has happend in details:
New Features
RECONNECT creates individual time lines for each player. With every played round, the result (quit / reconnect / win / game over) will affect all future rounds/gameplay. Some players wanted more feedback in the game, to know where they actually are on their journey. Others wanted an overall speedup. Therefore we introduce these new features:
overall gameloop
- AI-Scouts - Until you collected 10% of AI-data, scouts will spice up your building phase. Seeking and extracting data is their main goal, while you strengthen up the defence of your fragile source. Every spawning cycle of the AI, scouts exploring the map to find a source of energy/light. While you stay close in contact with the actual best AI-drones you can observe the development of their behaviour and optimize your network building decisions more quickly. Every new round the amount of scouts differs and evolves with saved AI networks to ensure the right amount of pressure you need to strengthen up your base and prepare for the "big wave".
- Reconnection-Screen - See the individual name, fitness and reached generation of your extracted artificial neural network alias LightKnight and the ingame play time. Enjoy the music of the source by watching the waves of the swarm from above. Every reconnection you finished you earn one LightKnight, which spawns spores in the next round to take over replicators.
- Game Over-Screen - You know when it is over. The game now slows down, deactivates your builder-tools and give you the name of the first replicator, which destroyed your light-source and therefore was saved. Keep in mind, next round the AI uses this knowledge to grow faster.
- Final Decision - This is the realm you started in and in which you will return, when you really "beat" the AI. You will then be confronted with a decision, where you can continue with all of your collected LightKnights and saved Replicators or finally delete all AI data and win the game. Winning the game means, that you have access to the ingame (cheat)terminal, to mutate the world after your needs.. There is an ongoing discussions about new geometric maps and skins you can achieve. Maybe next update? ;)
- Save Recovery - We appreciate the hours you played RECONNECT! That's why we update your save data when you start the game for the first time after this update. All reconnections, LightKnights, Replicators or Coins will be transferred and should be working fine. If not, find us on our discord server for help -> discord On the other hand, you can delete your save-data and reset RECONNECT, when you delete this folder: C:\\Users\\%USERNAME%\\AppData\\LocalLow\\RobotHeart Lab\\Reconnect
other changes:
- Coin-text-system rework - specialized for spores, new endings and scouts
- screenshot key now F11 (not F12 - steam button conflict) - help screens updated
- blue towers: selector and layers updated
- main menu sound filter rework
- main menu newest LightKnight highlighted
- LightKnight count saved in every round - ReSt.ipc
- replicator balance bar show time optimized
- collectable upgrades rearranged
- various script speed up
- a lot of minor and major bugfixes