Hello there! Once again, this one took longer than I would have liked. The Research & Development section is now available, being the third and last of the extra zones. There's also a bunch of fixes and tweaks, and some news about the upcoming 1.0 release.
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
The heart of SPHYNX, deep within the facility. Most of the power here was lost after the incident; the narrow corridors are barely lit by the faint glow of servers, computer terminals, and other sciencey stuff -a stark contrast with the open, vertical spaces of the previous extra zones.
As with the Warehouse and Waste Disposal areas, there's some exclusive themed gimmicks here. All in all, this might be the most "horror-like" section of the entire game.
LOCKERS
A staple in horror games that has been notoriously absent in Mandrillia, the Research Labs has many conveniently-player-sized lockers you can hide inside of. While you can use their small ventilation window to look outside, be careful as the Mandrillians might notice your glowy eyes (unless you're using the Stealth hull). Also, remember that these feeble doors can't handle much damage before getting destroyed, and you don't want to end up cornered in a locker with some angry Mandrillians right outside of it.
HANDHELD LASER CANNON
Our Robot protagonist is not the only Axiom product they've been trying to reverse-engineer.
Until now, the only energy weapons in the game have been Axiom products (the Plasma Revolver, the Plasma Rifle, and the stationary High Impact Plasma Cannon in Observation Chamber 2). The Laser Cannon is the result of SPHYNX biting more than they could chew and trying to copy some of Axiom's systems.
Sadly, they couldn't quite figure out plasma containment, so they had to go with the less efficient beam approach. It also needs a power source a bit more hefty than Axiom's handy plasma cartridges. The result is a very intimidating looking device that can barely hold more than 6 seconds of continued fire -not that you will be able to fire for 6 seconds straight, as it will overheat way sooner than that. Also, there's no way to load it outside of its dedicated charging station, and there's not enough power available at the weapon testing chamber... But surely you'll figure something out.
Obtaining the Handheld Laser Cannon prototype will reward you with the CUTTING EDGE achievement, as well as the weapon's entry on the item spawners.
EARLY ACCESS NEARLY OVER
With this update out, the game is -almost- ready to get out of Early Access.
My plan is to spend August testing, polishing and fine-tuning what's left, wrapping up the challenge lineup, and editing a new trailer for the full release (and maybe some other surprises). When all of that is done, update 0.9 will be the game with all its features fully locked (barring final bugfixing), and ready for its final release.
As always, feel free to join the Discord to give feedback, find other people to play with or just chat around. It's been an interesting run.
That's all for now. See you soon!
FULL CHANGELOG
- Added third and final extra zone: Research and Development Labs
- Added new unlockable weapon: Handheld Laser Cannon Prototype
- Added new achievement: CUTTING EDGE
- Removed top-down spectator camera and replaced it with an in-game first person stabilized camera
- Fixed Auto Shotgun having a wrong firing position (too far forwards) when attaching a silencer
- Fixed Coop Drones being unabled to be overclocked after attempting to overclock them while they were in critical condition
- Fixed corpses on the extra zones not properly spawning loot
- Fixed some visual glitches
- The clearance level to use the security cameras at the security room is now just low (cyan keycard) instead of high (yellow keycard)
- Modified iron sight glow for the handgun to hopefully improve target acquisition (try it at the firing range Gun Challenge!)
- RPG no longer on the random "checkpoint crate" pool; it will still appear on soldier corpses and as the last crate spawn on the "Starting Up" Coop Challenge
- Reworked Super Soldier match preset to be more fun