Here comes a new update for the Panoptic demo! We have been listening to your feedback, and have been working on some often-requested features. This should hopefully kickstart a more timely update release schedule, too. Without further ado, here is what you can expect with this update:
Game Modifiers!
We have implemented several optional modifiers that can be toggled from the Vive's main menu screen. This is a first step towards letting you customize the difficulty level, and the first three options are:
- Setting a limit to the number of "innocent" NPCs the Overseer can shoot and kill before losing the game. Make sure you know who you are aiming at!
- Setting the reload time between consecutive shots. This can be made less than, or more than the default value.
- Choosing whether NPCs should respawn when killed. This avoids just killing all NPC’s in specific areas; which made it way too easy to spot the PC player.
Analytics
In order to let us gather as much feedback as possible, we have implemented some analytics reporting. In the interest of transparency, here is the (anonymous!) data the game will report :
- The values of the various game modifiers selected
- The number of games during each play session
- The duration of each game
- The winner (Overseer or Challenger)
- The number of shots and kills made by the Overseer
We plan to use these data points to balance the game as best as we can. Again, we stress that the data is completely anonymous, and we will do our utmost to communicate appropriately if we need to add more data to the reporting. We know data collection is a sensitive issue, and we take it seriously, but the game will benefit a lot from it!
Other balance tweaks
Since game balance is something we really need to improve, we have included a number of smaller, but important changes:
- The vision of the Overseer is blocked when peeking into buildings.
- The walking speed and patterns of the NPCs have been tweaked to match the Challenger speed more closely, making it a bit easier to blend in.
- NPCs will be a bit smarter and try to avoid the Challenger, making moving around easier.
- There is now a roof on the starting elevator.
Controller support
Controllers are now fully supported. While you cannot yet reassign buttons, the setup is fairly standard:
- Right stick for looking
- Left stick for moving around
- Any face button (A/B/X/Y or equivalent) to jump
- Any shoulder button to sprint
This means the underlying input code has been completely overhauled, and should hopefully solve the problem with constant rotation certain users were encountering.
And there is more!
We also have some other tweaks and fixes for you all:
- Pressing ESC (or Start on a controller) will no longer dump you back in the main menu. Rather, it will bring up an in-game menu on the Challenger's screen with options to resume, go to the menu, restart, or quit the game. Be warned: the game is not paused, so you are still vulnerable!
- Some navmesh bugs have been solved, removing some "jumps" from the NPCs.
That is all for this update. Hope you will all enjoy these new features, and do not forget you can reach us through these forums, or through Twitter or Facebook! Talk to you all soon!
-The Panoptic development team