It’s been a while since our last update. We’ve been hard at work on getting new features ready for the release of Interstellar Rift, but during that time we’ve also worked on a lot of smaller things, some of which we’d like to get to you sooner.
This includes a couple new building blocks, an update of the options menus, an update of the mission UI, adding a new mission center to the GRIP, a new advancement system and some weapon tweaks, among other things.
The mission UI has been reworked, we felt like the old one took up too much screen real estate, and interacting with it was a real pain. The new hud elements are much more minimalistic and can be controlled from the GRIP, which has a new “Missions” tab. Here you can set your active mission and view all mission related information. As part of this redesign we also removed the compass that would pop up at the bottom of the screen, as it was often confusing to track your destination this way. Markers now follow the edges of your screen instead.
We also removed the Guide from the game, the guide was an attempt to help players better understand what goals they could set for themselves. However, we found that almost nobody used it, as it was not an intuitive way to play through the game. One aspect of the Guid (the markers on damaged devices), has now been moved to the repair gun instead.
To replace the guide there is now an advancements tab on your GRIP in the status menu. These are tracked per server/save and give you small rewards for obtaining certain resources or completing objectives. We will expand on this system in the future to give more fitting rewards for specific actions, such as ammunition for killing a certain amount of Skrill, etc. At the moment it gives you extra credits and small amounts of faction reputation.
We have also gone through the tutorials and made a few changes. Firstly they now unlock in order. Secondly we used the new mission UI to create small bullet point tasks and information, instead of the larger texts we previously had. We also updated the marker system to be more specific to the goal.
On the weapon side, the Torpedo launchers are now tier 0, and there is now an extra mid tier of torpedo, the Improved Torpedo. Torpedoes now do more damage and have lower resources costs for their recipes. The same goes for Rail Gun Ammunition. For specifics on this, please see the patch notes.
There are also a couple of new building blocks in this update, there is a full hexagon set, with walls, lights, floors and ceilings, as well as a new DecoBlock wall piece, which also has a version with a light.
There's a couple more changes in this patch, but they are pretty minor, please see the patch notes for the full change log.
As always, thank you all for playing and we’ll see you starside!
-The Split Polygon Team