Early Access Update Sjutton (17)
build id: 564CC4FD
Hello all! We are happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.
New Game Mode : Deathmatch
Immediately following the Update 16 we were feeling a bit burnt out, so we decided to try to hack together a quick and dirty alternate game mode just for fun. We have had several such modes in mind, but we decided to try a Player vs Player mode, and it turned out pretty well. We're calling it Deathmatch so people will know what it is about; basically it's Player vs Player and the winner is the last one alive.
Beasts, Creeps and Sentries are all disabled in Deathmatch, and the player flashlight and emissive textures on the player models are turned off. Toggling the split-screen team view is also disabled. All of this amounts to a very tense experience, where you tend to try to be as quiet as possible and use all your senses to determine where the other players are.
True to our typical form a player only has a single life, but you can take the usual amount of bullet hits resulting in electronics damage before you are killed. Repair Stations are available so that you have a change to recover from this damage.
Datacores are as usual, with all upgrades available, but in Deathmatch only the player who actually downloads gets an upgrade (no sharing). Other players do not show up as icons in the tracker / map in this mode, but they do instead trigger the motion tracker in the same way as Beasts and Creeps. It is of course very useful to have the various Motion Tracker upgrades, but skilled players will know when to stand still to counter this.
Because you are shooting at other players the various ammo types matter less, as each hit only knocks out a single electronics system. This means that you may want to stick to orange ammo, as this gives the best rate of fire, but there is a caveat; we have enabled ricochets for all player bullets in all game modes. As a result, higher ammo types (with more energy) will ricochet more, and it is therefore possible to shoot quite effectively around corners.
These player bullet ricochets are a tweaked version of what the Sentry bullets do, and behave in a somewhat more realistic fashion. Don't worry, it isn't possible to cause your own bullets to ricochet straight back at you as they take the angle of incidence into account. Player bullets will behave in a consistent manner, and it is posible to become quite skilled at aiming ricochets. Also, after careful playtesting we decided to leave the Sentry bullets as they were, simply because we think the crazy Sentry ricochets are a lot of fun; they can still reflect straight back from a wall.
We have also added much more feedback to the effects of any bullets that hit a player, as Deathmatch needed more explicit hit feedback. These effects are always enabled, and you will see them in all game modes.
All in all we've been having a lot of fun with Deathmatch during internal testing, and we have found it to be an even more tense experience than playing vs Beasts. Long stretches of silence and sneaking often end in furious firefights where all players are unsure of exactly what is going on. Not for the faint of heart!
Oh yes, as a result of there being two official game modes now, we have renamed the previous mode "Breaches" to "Salvage". We have also added a quick selector for game mode to the basic party screen, as well as a number of new statistics that are displayed in accordance with the selected game mode.
New Weapon : Razor
We have added a new weapon, the Razor. This is basically a rapid fire version of the Rifle, firing bullets 25% faster. The trade is that the Razor also does 25% less damage. Bullets fired from the Razor will push Beasts exactly the same amount as all other bullets, and in conjunction with the higher rate of fire this allows the Razor to still be viable option regardless of the lower damage per bullet. The Razor also has a slightly smaller muzzle flare than the Rifle.
We have yet to determine what the best weapon for Deathmatch might be...
Miscellaneous
- Any bullets that aren't fired by the a given player will register as motion (in the tracker), and boost adrenaline in the same way as other motion. Try firing a Razor next to another player...
Other Things That We've Been Doing And Might Implement Later
- We've done some resarch into Physically Based Rendering, and are considering switching our renderer and materials to use that approach.
- We've been trying out some VERY speculative alternative user interface schemes, based on 3-dimensional hexagons. Very cool, but still requires a bit of work and evaluation, and we want to prioritize gameplay features right now.
As always, thank you for your support and patience,
/nornware AB c/o johno
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