Hello there! More Mandrillian-centered features!
As I said on the previous update, right now I'm focusing on making Mandrillian gameplay more fun. This one brings ragdoll physics, jumping mechanics, and some anti-frustration features for the PC players.
RAGDOLL PHYSICS
These don't need much introduction. Everybody loves them. No more pre-baked Mandrillian death animations clipping into walls! Now you'll see these apes slam against obstacles in full glory.
SMALL GIBBING REWORK
Mechanics-wise, the gibbing threshold has been increased.
Before: gibbing happened if a monkey received (in a very short amount of time) damage equivalent to 2x the base HP + 1 (so, on standard monkey body HP of 100, anything above 201 damage would cause gibbing).
Now: threshold increased to 3x the base HP. This makes Mandrillians feel a bit less like they're made of plasticine, and also makes for fun situations like a monkey stepping on a mine, its dead body being thrown into another mine, and then getting blown up.
Visually it's been optimized and improved; now gibs will appear in the proper locations and will carry proper momentum (so gibbing a ragdolled monkey will still look natural).
With this came a small nerf: gibbing will no longer cause the respawn timer to end up faster. But on the other hand...
JUMP! AND IMPROVED ENVIRONMENT COLLISIONS
I feared this would break the game but so far it feels fun and balanced.
Monkeys can now jump at any time! Press Space Bar/A button. It's not a massive jump, but good enough to vault over small obstacles -one main frustration I felt the Mandrillian players had was navigating around barrels and console tables. Before you try it: no, you can't jump safely over sticky flames.
To add to this, the collision with walls and other obstacles has been improved and smoothed, making it way more predictable and reducing situations where your monkey would feel stuck against door frames and other obstacles.
QOL STUFF
VENT VISUAL AID
Being able to jump around made it a bit more annoying to properly get into vents (only visual aid so far was the little context button indicator). I've added a handy visual helper that will indicate when your Mandrillian is ready to jump in, both on the ground and around the vent itself.
ELECTRIC MERCY
Last update brought diminishing returns for chaining electrocutions. For this one I've also made it impossible to push the monkeys around while they are being electrocuted. While funny, it did get annoying pretty fast for the monkeys when they got electrocuted and then pushed into a cloud of toxic gas or worse stuff.
GAME TOO DARK?
I've also been getting complaints about the game being too dark, especially for PC players. The game has a gamma setting, but I guess many horror games force you to set your gamma on first launch for a reason. I might do the same in the future.
For the moment, I've changed the default gamma setting from 0.15 to 0.25 (if you have fired up the game before you'll still have it at 0.15 or whatever value you had left it at).
I've also made the "monkey headlights" a default for most presets, while still being turned off in modes like Horror, Robot Beginner, or in the case of Robot Bias it's only enabled on zoom. As any other setting, you can always freely change it.
FULL CHANGELOG
- New Mandrillian mechanic: jumping (spacebar/A button)
- Gibbing threshold increased from "x2 base HP + 1" to "x3 base HP"
- Gibbing no longer makes Mandrillians respawn faster
- Dead Mandrillians can't be resurrected with a Repair Kit anymore (they can still be healed if they are alive)
- Mandrillians can no longer be pushed around while they are being electrocuted.
- Visually improved and optimized gibbing system
- Ragdoll physics on Mandrillian death