Developer postOriginal post (opens in a new tab)

Dev journal #3

Heyo! We're in the home stretch before the Steam Game Festival (ICYMI: it's been postponed until June 16). As such, the last dev cycle has been focused almost entirely on bug fixes and quality of life stuff.

Interact dots

The interaction points for some objects--in particular, exits--weren't super obvious since they didn't have outlines like other items. To make this a bit easier, I've added "interact dots" (thanks to God of War for the idea, heh).

This should make them much easier to interact with, especially in the heat of the moment.

Along with this, I've also added proper interaction outlines to the upgrade stations (workbench, dark altar).

Quick restart

Previously you would have to pause the game after dying in order to restart (inspired Half-Life 2, but I could see how it might not be obvious to some). With this change, you can now press any key to restart (a prompt will appear after 5 seconds).

Thanks to my new collaborator, Lukas, for his help with this.

Better spawning

The hallways connecting rooms are cluttered with props, but over time, the spawning logic kind of got away from me, and you'd end up with barrels falling over, blocking passages, etc.

I've taken the time to clean this up, and you'll now see much more consistent clutter. As a bonus, it creates these neat little hiding spots between rooms:

Feedback form

During the Steam Game Festival demo build--and likely most of early access--you'll be able to leave feedback by pressing F1!

We'll get the feedback through the STOMT site, as well as directly in Discord via a webhook.

Bug fixes

Whew, lots of these! With the extra week, I was able to fix pretty much all of the bugs I wanted to, including a few that were really nagging me! 🙌

  • Only allow shielding from limited angles
  • Improve mutant miner AI behaviour (minimize likelihood of them walking intro each other)
  • Hide beacon launcher on death
  • Fix for beacon impact projector disappearing after pausing
  • Fix for beacon impact projector rendering when no beacons
  • Fix for enemies not always finding a random wander target
  • Fix for debris culled with room, causing it to disappear in some cases
  • Disable interaction with lockers (until they actual contain things, heh)
  • Fix some missing colliders (was making some crate drops difficult to collect)
  • Replace Windows NT screen with something less likely to lead to legal issues 😉
  • Fix for rats spawning outside of level

Edit: spoke too soon, captured this choice GIF while prepping this post! 😅

I have to go now, my planet needs me.