For anyone wondering, the tagline for this update is definitely not a reference or acronym for anything ;)
For real though thank you UWIP for the video, a few of us had a Discord watch party and we enjoyed watching you guys experience our game.
Hello everyone, sorry for the long wait. If you haven't read patch notes 0.2.2 please at least read the paragraph at the bottom; it will give you some more context about the future update schedule of Contingency Plan. I meant every word, and thank you all so much for playing. It took longer than I expected to get internet at my new apartment and my first few months at work were very exciting. It thrills me that I get to do what I love as a job and have a game to develop for all you lovely people as well, but my 9-5 is working in Unity and sometimes when I come home, looking at more Unity is not necessarily the first thing I want to do. I hope you all can understand.
Now into the update! I've been hard at work making improvements to our existing ground enemies as well as finally making the ship turrets useful with enemy ships!
Enemies
- Introducing enemy ships! There are a few different variants of these ships that will spawn in as squadrons throughout a mission and on certain mission events.
- Ground enemies have been given a full rework and should play much better.
Gameplay
- Added flashbang and frag grenades.
- Added a temporary damage resistance powerup.
- Relocated all repair panels to the tech room in the rear of the ship.
- Rebalanced player health and damage values to force more methodical gameplay instead of blindly running in and shooting. Use your grenades!
- The ship will take reduced damage when less than 3 players are in the lobby. (2 players -10%, 1 player -30%) This only affects ship hull damage, not shield. Also if you're playing singleplayer this may not be the best experience in the first place.
- Sped up auto-dock sequence. This change is meant to encourage docking to structures and dropping off/picking up players to complete the objective while fighting off and fleeing from enemy ships.
- Added a short information section to the level select menu describing the selected level before locking in your destination.
- Reduced level select options to 3.
- Reduced player death penalty to 10 ship hull damage.
Shop
- Added the ability to purchase grabbable items (such as weapons and grenades) from the shop.
- Prevented items from appearing twice in the same shop.
- Gave the ship turret purchases stats to display on the purchase menu so that you may be a more informed consumer.
- Added gambling.
QoL
- Added settings for snap turn angle and smooth turn speed.
- Added a visual indicator when taking damage.
- Added an "armory" to the medbay -- it's just some shelves.
- Reworked player inventory to be more reliable and user-friendly. Also added 3 more slots (total of 6).
- The warp waypoint is no longer visible on the turret cameras to improve shooting visibility.
- Created a new system to apply hand grab animations custom for an individual object.
Bugfixes
- Fixed grabbable items in docked environments disappearing when docking to or undocking from the environment. Please report any bugs or issues you find with this new system, as well as any objects that consistently still disappear after this fix.
- Hopefully fixed weapons sometimes not firing when you pull the trigger.
- Improved weapon hit registration.
Known Issues
- Grab hand animations are not properly synced across the network.
- Grab hand animations are only applied to a few items.
- Grab hand animations sometimes only apply when grabbing an item for the second time.
- Ship health falling to 0 teleports you into space to watch your ship explode. It should also rotate you towards the ship, but currently does not.
- After you lose you are placed back into the lobby map. There may be some issues with continuing to play after this point. We recommend restarting the lobby, but please report any bugs you encounter if you choose to not restart the lobby.
- If the host disconnects from the lobby, sometimes clients will not return to lobby map. They will instead remain in gameplay map but nothing will work.
- On game startup you may be in the floor and will need to run your headset software's recenter/recalibrate routine.
Planned
- Movement stick deadzone settings to be added to the settings menu
- Settings to Invert certain axes of ship controls
- Better client experience for rover training level
- Ship radar
- More missions, many more missions
- Gradually phase out our old placeholder assets for better ones (rip cube playermodel)
- And more!
Finally, with this update comes the announcement of pushing back our stated end of end-of-early access date to the end of 2026. Let's be honest, we were never going to hit our October 2024 deadline; that's already passed now, let alone for 1.0. With this update, I have been able to gauge how much work I can do while having a career, and it's not much, so I have decided to drastically push back this date.
How will this affect you? It won't. Updates have, and always will, come when they are ready. This is a small project run by only a few people who have primary jobs we must attend to. I just want to let future players properly know what to expect. We apologize if this announcement brings some disappointment but we hope you can understand.
Thanks for playing
- Thomas & Camden