The last big feature has been fully implemented and with that... we are now in Beta version 0.1!
Now we can really focus on improving everything that's currently in the game and add the missing bits and bobs.
Let's take a look at this update.
The Shop:
The infections have gained in power, but so can you. Use the funds you gathered from your many missions and invest in new suits, tools and weapons or upgrade your current ones. The new shop in your spaceship will provide you with all your needs.
The Store is now fully functional, you can buy all the base items now and we will start adding a bunch of extra items and upgrades in future updates. The interface has been updated from the previous version to make it more intuitive. It also has had some bugfixes. Weapon prices have been lowered to make the game less grind-y. More advanced future items, tools and weapons will be more expensive however as those are meant to aid higher ranking players when harder missions are available to them.
Your Store inventory is saved along with the rest of your stats and synced with Steam Cloud.
Bugfixes:
- The Infection hurt sounds no longer cut each other off,
- Fixed navigation in Airlock type 4, Crew should no longer get stuck on the corner there,
- Fixed missing infection textures on some of the stair assets,
Polishes:
- The Hunter screams now get muffled in low-oxygen environments,
- The Infection effect is now much stronger on heavily infected areas to create a more tense atmosphere,
- Missions have a much lower chance to have the repair Secondary Objective if the player/team rank is low to make things much more fair for newer players. This is also to give a feel of progression as more Objectives become available as players go up in rank,
- Amateur missions are more common for new/low rank players,
- Amateur missions no longer have the requirement of having to destroy the infection to prevent penalizing new players that cannot afford Weapons just yet,
- Mission info and Mission debriefing menus have been updated according to the new Amateur mission requirements,
- Updated Mission Control voice lines to better reflect Mission success and failure on different difficulties and (un)completed objectives,
- The difficulty of Missions has been further adjusted depending on Team rank, to give a greater sense of progression as higher difficulty tiers unlock as players rank up,
- Added more spawn points for Special Items,
- Added a new style of infected area effect to make the infected areas feel more alien and creepy.
Now that we've had a look at the present, let's take a look at...
The Future:
There's a couple of important things we need to tackle:
- Missing assets: some of the level assets are still unfinished and there's still a few (functional) rooms we want to add such as a cockpit and an oxygen farm.
- Finish the Infection's monsters: most of them are already in the game but require a bit more polishing and gameplay depth, the Item monsters especially are still rather bare-bones.
- Polishing of existing features: everything is in the game and functional but some things still require further work to be at the level we want them to be.
- Fixing bugs: is something we have been doing along the way, but now we don't need to implement major new features anymore we can focus much better on fixing bugs without introducing new ones right after.
- Proximity voice chat, properly: we've had an implementation of voice chat before in the game, but it didn't work as well as we'd hoped. We're going to try a new approach using Steam Voice which should work a lot better, but will require some time and experimentation to get right.
- Localization: we want to translate the game into multiple languages, though this will take some doing and assistance as there's quite a bit of text in the game and we do not currently have a translator in our midst. If you're willing to help us out with for example (SImplified) Chinese, Russian or Polish let us know!