Happy New Year
Today the waiting is finally over. The beta for SCP: Observer will be released today at 3pm CET. As the first Development News post of the new year and the last post before the start of the beta, I would like to make some more announcements.
Announcements
I have a lot of major changes I want to cover in this post. First of all, I have disabled Early Access for SCP: Observer. The reason for this is that I want to release a fully playable and largely bug-free game. After the official game is released I don't plan on adding any new main SCPs or zones, just quality of life changes, new events or other small things and I don't need Early Access for that. This has no downside for you as a player, since you will be getting a fully playable game at release.
The next big change I want to announce is that I have removed SCP-966 from the game. The reason for this is that SCP-966 was a particularly difficult SCP to balance in the game. In my opinion, his mechanics with the infrared vision cameras were not suitable and destroyed some important game mechanics. That doesn't mean I won't add him back in the future, but he won't be a main SCP.
While trying to balance the Heavy Containment Zone and removing SCP-966 I realized that the old map was really unbalanced and too big. Therefore, I have revised the entire map Heavy Containment. The image below shows the new map. The dark red color indicates the room you are watching.
I also added a camera action to start a camera scan. The camera scan shows the position of all detected SCPs on the camera map, by letting the corresponding rooms blinking in the same dark red color. After activating the scan, the output might look like the following image.
Last but not least, I added the icons for usage, blink and stamina bars, as well as the icons for interaction and crouching.