Welcome, Survivors!
How have you been? I'm happy to tell you that the development of YAZS is progressing well.
Today we'd like to show you some of the new systems we're implementing that we hope will make the game even more enjoyable for different playstyles.
New recruitment system!
We've talked about the separation of the leveling and character recruitment mechanics before, but here's some more detail. When you level up, you're choosing to upgrade one of the characters you already have on your team - we no longer include new character recruitment options in this screen.
In order to recruit new survivors, you'll need to respond to distress calls, which will occur frequently throughout the course of the game. When an SOS occurs, you'll be notified and can follow an arrow to the location of someone you can rescue.
When you interact with that person, you can either recruit a new character from the pool of survivors you've unlocked, or rescue them for a reward if you want to take on the zombies as a lone wolf or as a two-person team.
We're hoping this system will improve the experience by giving players much more control over which upgrades they want to focus on and when do they do that in the current run. It also gives you more incentive to explore the levels.
Items & Chests!
In our older builds, opening a chest resulted in a level-up screen. Sounds boring, right? We're changing that by introducing items to the game and making them drop from chests!
Most of the items will be easy-to-understand modifiers to all sorts of different team stats. Many of them can also be found and taken multiple times to increase their effect. There will also be rare, more powerful versions of each item to find!
Chests will continue to drop randomly as well as from boss enemies — which will now drop tons of experience gems as an additional reward! Overall, don't worry about leveling slower as a result of this change, as we will be balancing the level curve to make it feel at least as fast, if not faster!
Our plan is to make the item chest system another factor that adds depth and replayability to the game for everyone, as items are tied to the current run, and you'll find different ones each time you play!
Powerful Power-ups!
As well as adding new zombies, we're also improving what they drop. These new pickups will act as temporary bonuses to your team, drastically increasing some stats for a short period of time.
For example, Attack Frenzy reduces the cooldown between weapon attacks and Stone Skin multiplies your current armour value. Each of these buffs lasts for 10 seconds, and you can have several types of these active at once!
It'll also be easier to find dropped health and magnet pickups, as we've added guide arrows for the most important drops, each with a different color to make them easier to spot in a fight.
Oh, and there's a new enemy type and a new character abilities in the GIF above!
Until next time!
Thank you for reading! As a quick reminder, we plan to launch the Early Access version on July 13.
Make sure you follow the game to find out when we'll be sharing more information from the development process! Remember that you can find us on the various social media channels and chat with us directly on our Discord server:
https://discord.gg/m4JfXuS
PS on the topic of character class spoiler in the previous developer news: that item won't keep her away.