Early Access Update 2
build id: 2015-04-28_20-20-13
Hi everyone! We are happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.
New Level Styles
We are working on a number of new level styles, all still in progress (as is pretty much everything in the game), but we wanted to share what we have with you. What we realized was that it was possible to "flip" all the existing level styles and thereby create new looks. This led to more polish and fully unique identities slowly emerging from each style.
3 new work in progress styles are included in this update, with more change to come on those styles, and eventually even more styles. We aim to reach a point where even we aren't exactly sure what style the game is currently running.
"Easier" Mission Mode / No Zero-Breach Missions
We have added a new "Easier" Mission Mode which is by no means "easy". It features more infrequent Breach and Beast spawns, effectively taking much longer to saturate the map with enemies. Note however that the Beasts themselves are not changed, so individual encounters are as lethal as they ever where.
Is is furthermore no longer possible to roll a mission without any breaches, regardless of the mission mode.
Alternate Sentry Friendly Fire
There has been some contention regarding Sentry friendly fire in the game. This feature came for free when we implemented player vs player friendly fire since bullets are all the same in the game. We initially felt that it was very much in the spirit of the game to make Sentry fire dangerous to the players. Of course, they have always and continue to try to avoid firing when a player is in their field of fire.
With the introduction of the highly experimental game mode option to have Breaches appear randomly in the map we however found that instances of Sentry friendly fire increased and in many instances felt quite unfair. It is technically always the case that the player is to blame, as the only way to get shot is to be mobile within the Sentry field of fire. If you are static and obstructing a Sentry, it will never fire and just angrily beep at you.
The edge cases have always been what happens in the short time the bullet is in flight, as well as the cases where the Beast is between the Sentry and the player. This is clear shot as far as the Sentry is concerned, but there will often be more shots fired than are required to kill the Beast (as bullet damage is random to some extent), and as a result the extra bullets will often kill a player who is in a bad position.
This has been a hard problem to solve, as simply removing this feature seems (to us) to be dumbing down a nice hardcore aspect of this game. We have however come up with an alternative that after initial testing feels like it both increases tension and challenge to the game, as follows.
Sentry bullets will now no longer kill Players. What they will do is cause large changes to view angles on impact. This significantly messes up Player aim. The impact is also accompanied by a blinding flash that completely whites out for view for a short time, further increasing the chance of disorientation.
The big change however is the introduction of Electronics Damage. There are now 5 systems that control various aspects of the player Heads Up display: Flashlight, Text, Visor / Icons, Weapon, and Tracker / Map. When a Sentry bullet strikes a player, in addition to the above noted effects, a random system will become damaged, as follows:
- Damage to Flashlight will completely remove the player light. Firing the weapon will still cause muzzle flare lights.
- Damage to Text will completely remove all text from the heads up display, including objectives, live battery and ammo counts, as well as distance to objective and motion information.
- Damage to Visor / Icons will remove all upgrade icons from the heads up display, including the aiming crosshair. Visor can be disabled as a user option, but if enabled it will be removed with damage to this system.
- Damage to Weapon will remove all emissive textures as well as ammunition display from the weapon. Ammo warning audio will also be removed.
- Damage to Tracker / Map will completely remove the Tracker / Map.
If a player survives a mission with damage to Electronics these will be restored upon starting the next mission. No upgrades are lost under any circumstances.
We have seen cases where a player with ALL HUD systems destroyed manage to find their way out of a mission with no light, no distance readout, and no aiming crosshair. Anyone who achieves this feat should feel proud indeed, and things like this seem like natural candidates for implementation as Steam Achievements.
Misc Changes
We have changed the render order of Pathfinders to be: Airlock, Coolant, Sentry, Data. This fixes the problem of the Airlock icon obscuring the Reactor / Coolant icon.
Work In Progress: Networked / Online Multiplayer
The big thing that we have been working on lately is networked / online / "real" multiplayer, as this is both a high priority for the community and for us internally at nornware. This is still a work in progress, and there is nothing related included in this update.
Work In Progress: New player character model
All the modelling, texturing, and basic animation work is done on our new Hero / Player character. Sadly we haven't had time to integrate this into the game yet, but will as soon as possible.
Thoughts on Update Frequency
In general we think that would like to push out updates roughly weekly. This time two weeks have passed, mainly due to the fact that we have been working on networked multiplayer which still isn't finished. Still, we wanted to put an update out that addresses other things that we have deemed as big deals in the forums. For those of you who are eagerly awaiting networked multiplayer, hopefully these changes will tie you over in the meantime.
thanks for your support and patience,
/nornware AB c/o johno
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