Hello everyone and happy new year!
We're back with a developer news to kick off this new year. We're going to talk about the next update and share with you things we’re preparing for the final release of the game. We hope you’re getting hyped!
Next Update
We consider this update as a minor one in which we'll focus on general polish: better balance in the game, making bosses feel more fair and interesting, enemies too, improving the movement flow in the levels, increasing the randomness in the environment, diversifying enemy compositions, adjusting visual effects and clarity etc…
We won’t have a playtest phase this time around and we’ll be releasing the update as soon as it’s ready, around the beginning of February if all goes well.
Optimization & Balancing
The major part of the update focuses on optimizing the game. We are reworking a lot of core systems in order to gain performance. We still have a lot of work to do on that side to deliver a truly stable and finished game.
Same goes for balancing. We are currently happy with the perk system and can now focus on balancing and improving build capabilities and diversity. Your feedback is always super valuable in that regard and we’re closely following them.
Bosses
We made some improvements to most bosses in order to make them fairer and cleaner. Dr. Turret is the one that underwent the most modifications, to the point that we can call it a "rework". We wanted to keep the essence of this boss but make it more engaging and less unfair on some attack patterns. He may end up being a bit too difficult for an Act-1 boss, in this case we will quickly update the values and his attack patterns speed. You will be able to find the details of these modifications in the next patch note, which we will pay extra attention to.
Weapon Upgrade Machine
We will reintroduce the weapon upgrade machine in the next update. Though, we are still very divided on this feature internally. On one hand we want it to be possible to carry your favorite weapon throughout the game. But on the other hand, we also want to incentivize changing weapons. Failing to find the most elegant solution that could satisfy everyone, we are going to return the weapon upgrade machine for the moment, but with higher prices incrementing every time you use the machine. While waiting for our next solution (with some new things that we are going to start implementing and iterating upon soon), we hope that giving you back the choice to upgrade your weapon will be more interesting for you for the time being.
Snipers & Cells Gathering
In a previous update, we enabled sniper rifles to collect cells from afar regardless of critical hits, transforming this playstyle into an easier version of the game. In the next update we will try to increase the effectiveness of snipers while suppressing their ability to collect cells from afar, to make it necessary to dive into the heap once more. To counterbalance this change we also made the choice to increase the lifespan of cells, because they put a lot of players in difficult situations. Though the most aggressive sniper players were already looking for speed and efficiency and shouldn’t feel much difference.
Game Levels
We are preparing new game levels that will complete the game when released. For now, you can take several paths in the game but these paths do not serve a purpose, yet. The only thing you can experience right now is the shorter "clear time" of some paths vs the others. These paths are actually part of a larger plan and will hopefully make more sense once you find out what we have prepared for the full game. Early Access allows us to better calibrate the game's "spine" based on your feedback and we’re focusing on that before expanding to the rest of the skeleton.