Hello Again! ːsteamhappyː
Here's another roundup of the latest notable changes and additions to Demining.
These weeks have been busy. I've visually reworked the market, made the ATV fully compatible in multiplayer but these are the most...
Standout Improvements / Changes / Additions
Achievements were supposed to be in the game on release but some other more pressing issues came in the way. Now i'm happy to announce that there are 18 achievements up for grabs, where some may provide hints about content you have yet to discover.
The large open tent in lowlands used to serve a purpose in an earlier unreleased version of the game. However, that purpose doesn't exist anymore and it felt like to me that it was only standing in the way for players that wanted to utilize the ATV. I also been meaning to add more dense vegetation to the game so kind of took out two birds with one stone here.
While at it, I also made the decision to close down the well for now as it similarly to the Lowlands tent mentioned above - has lost its purpose over time. For now, I've added a lid on top of the well which I intend to turn into a puzzle in the future as may be slightly hinted on the model for it.
The artifact that could previously be found in the well under certain conditions, can now instead be found on top of the lid if those conditions are met so you don't have to go down to fetch it anymore, for now.
Lastly, random scenic objects now appears in each sector for each day, which is part of some ongoing work to keep the experience fresh for each new day. The pool of objects that can spawn are partly the same objects which a Mimic can hide under so you can never be truly sure of what you think is a mimic anymore unless you see it twitching.
Initially the game had 3 hallucinations, where one was scrapped right before launch which kind of left the system feel a bit empty. This guy was initially going to be another "Turtle", but one thing led to another. This new hallucination can approach several players at once and also overlap with other active hallucinations. Once he's latched onto a player, he will always follow them around but very slowly for the rest of the day unless its baited into a Spotlight.
So be sure to keep your sanity high!
Previously, there were always 5 mines to disarm in the tutorials that could be disarmed by anyone. Meaning that if 1 player disarmed all 5 mines, the other 3 players would be left with none. To address this - There are now several "disarm chambers" that will open up when getting to that part of the tutorial. Each chamber has 4 mines to disarm and is individually assigned to players in the game.
About the frequent/daily patches...
This is not sustainable for my health. Now that the game runs well, most obvious bugs are fixed and many QOL features are implemented I will slow down on the updating. I will instead update the game only when there is a substantial amount of new/changed content.
If there are any game breaking or soft locking issues I will still hot-fix it on the current version, but hold back on releasing the new stuff til its spicy enough.
This is both for my sake but also to make sure that returning deminers feel like its worth checking out/coming back for.
That's all I got for now.
Thank you for readingːsteamhappyː