Alpha 1.20 - Story mode revamp
Developer commentary:
This update was originally also going to contain the actual story, as told in unlockable documents, but the writing took far longer than expected and so that part will be added in Alpha 1.21, while this update contains the relevant gameplay updates. As of right now, story mode contains most of the actual gameplay of story mode, but very little of the main story itself, which is in its 2nd or 3rd draft at this point.
Story mode has been disabled for a few updates by this point. The main goal of this update was to improve communication to the player in story mode, but it eventually branched to increasing communication everywhere. I still kept the relatively maze-like layout, but now the player actually has more direction as the map is split into multiple distinct parts. Before, fights were triggered extremely abstractly, but now the player can actually see enemy squads moving from room to room, and the only way fights are forcibly triggered is if the player and an enemy squad overlap.
The player can now also constantly view their inventory and gene mods, as well as hover over them in order to see descriptions of each one whenever they need to. Furthermore, the stat bars for characters have been reused for attack moves in the customization screen for easier comparisons.
Most of this update was built using tools and systems I had already built specifically to be flexible, so I really had to thank my past self for having the foresight to spend all that extra time refactoring old code to make it more powerful. These patch notes are pretty short, but each feature individually took a lot of time and iterations, and I'm sure more are to come.
-Story mode
-Story mode now has dynamic dialogue between levels
-Each individual character can have their own comments and monologues
-If a character does not have their own dialogue for a situation, it defaults to a generic one.
-Added new room types
-Gun training range
-Archives
-Replaced a set number of actions with an infinite amount, until you fight guards.
-New specific "loot" icons indicating which rooms have loot and which do not.
-Removed doorway, must defeat all enemies to continue
-Updated enemy and loot distribution for all room types
-Machine gunners now guaranteed spawn in the gun ranges, security headquarters, and the exit gate, and only extremely rarely in other rooms.
-Bosses now have a very tiny chance of spawning outside of their normal rooms
-Map node connection lines now taper, indicating which is closer to the player
-Added map zoom and scrolling
-Removed "ambush" and "reinforced" features, replaced with hidden guard tokens and increased guard spawns later into the game
-Stealth is does not work on the Security Strongholds and Exit nodes
-Added controller support for the map UI screen
-Disabled the upgrade screen as gene mods are now intended to be the only power progression
-General Gameplay
-Different martial styles now have different stats for parrying
-Amateur: bad parry.
-Muay Thai: weak, quick parry with short recovery window. Low commitment, low reward
-Wing Chun: very powerful parry with very high vulnerability on recovery. High risk, high reward
-Tae Kwon Do: weak parry with average timings. The style does not focus on parrying.
-Kyokushin: very strong, extended parry, with a long recovery window. A burst of strong defense, with an extended period of vulnerability.
-Removed enemy limit since there is now a soft cap on the number of enemies that can attack you at once
-UI
-Items and gene mods now show up as icon that can also be hovered over for information
-Lock/unlock mouse default rebound to R instead of M
-New notification for waiting that makes it more obvious what it does
-Random mods/items are now generated before selecting so you know what you will get
-Moves now have stat bars to easily visually compare
-Moves show more info on the page when selected