Greetings!
This update comes with one little feature that we think will help navigating level ends - a new sense, a bio sonar!
It will be shown where hunting down each victim matters the most - at level ends, in boss fights and also in Aquarium. It will display enemies as red bars and nutrition as green ones. Sonar should help to feel and see beyond borders of the screen.
Internally we have introduced a Range stat which controls range of all zooid abilities. In future, we will be adding zooids and/or powerups, abilities that change stats and enables having more varied playstyle. In this version, range can be seen in zooid tooltips.
Our Input System backend has been completely changed. That means we are going further to support controllers and any kind of input devices. That is now noticeable in main menu and ingame menus as we have added full keyboard/controller support in those cases. The bad news is that existing control binds in options menu will be reset and will have to be re-bound.
In future patches we will be tackling Growth mode and Aquarium mode inputs as well as adapting movement controls to new inputs. Currently Auto Turn and Tank movement types are playable, however we have not tweaked them up to quality we prefer. Ironically, Twinstick movement types will still be following mouse, thus will not work with controller input well. Default skill binds are still designed to for mouse + keyboard controls which we will have to fix as well for controller-only players. Let us know how you expect to control your creature colony and which buttons you would like to use for skills in comments below!
And a little distraction from our request above - full version changelist! We left some of internal changes in for the curious:
Version 0.4.3
- Add movement type report to Death and LevelEnd analytics
- Allow selecting Zooid to keep with Up/Down input axes
- Display negative stats in Zooid descriptions too
- Fix buffs not applying when there is no zooid type filter
- Generalise filtering buff targets by ZooidType in Buff Manager
- Head selection keyboard/controller support. Growth button to toggle tutorial
- Stats should be immutable structs
- Remember last active UI elements and select them when opening menus. This allows keyboard/controller menu navigating
- Fix input errors when the globalSettings file doesn't exist and fix issues with overwriting default bindings
- Fix saveWasJustLoaded retaining an invalid state when restarting the game
- Tweak Main Menu labels and make buttons properly select
- Add helper script that draws distance lines
- Use circle colliders on Bone ball obstacles instead of polygon colliders
- Add support for multipler colliders on Environment Object
- Disable occlusion check for Sonar
- Fix some Zooid layers not being set to Zooid
- Chill down whirlpools with their particle pulling
- Make Object spawner skill zooids and poisonous zooids scale with Range
- SkillUI uses pretty key strings
- Fix errors when loading a game save with the old bindings
- Fix errors when loading globalSettings with the old binding data
- Make Leeches use Range stat
- Undo the zooid selection UI work for a better merging experience
- The new input system obviously needs to have physics, xr and vr. At least it's not in-app-purchasing.
- Correct gamepad start button path
- When rebinding, consume all input for one frame after succeeding/cancelling the rebinding (avoid accidental menu closing etc.)
- Added a menu toggle button that is intended to remain static and not be changed by the user
- Add an input locking mechanism that allows ignoring all GameKey inputs
- Rearrange InputManager for better sanity
- Add Zooid Range stat to description
- Make Pusher work with Range stat
- Volter uses Range
- Make Sniper, Flak and development weapons use Ranged stat
- Don't revert to defaults if you can't resolve a button, use the previous binding path and show it as best we can
- Added a method to tell if a gamepad is used instead of the mouse
- Halve claw range influence as Range is better understood as diameter rathern than radius of damage
- Scale claw with Range stat
- Make Grabber use Range stat
- Make Spike weapon use Range stat
- Rename Food Pull stat to Range
- Fix food sonar indicators remaining visible
- Add SonarController which controls when Sonar is visible - during end of Campaign levels, always in boss fights and Aquarium
- Scale Muck animation with animator speed
- Make Sipho sonar indicators fade in and out
- Some form of input key beautification started
- Fix incorrect defaults for selecting zooids to grow
- Fix a bug where resetting to default controls did not persist between playthroughs
- Skills now work with the new unity input system
- Start work towards moving skill bindings over to the new system
- Don't remove device name when serializing unless we can substitute it with something
- Keep track of binding paths all the time, not just when serializing - needed when the controller gets unplugged
- Load saved bindings
- Make sure to invert the needed keys every time you resolve a binding
- Invert left/right stick key down and left buttons, solve all the problems without editing any unity input stuff
- Create an input settings asset and make buttons less sensitive
- Hack in a fix for stick.down/left not working
- Override the unity input system and push it to version control
- Fix default binding arrays not being filled with stuff, whoops! Added functions to get default ButtonControl arrays
- Gamedev, now with 50% less garbage, go green!
- Serialize controls as generically as possible. Controller has default bindings and can sort of be used
- Start using strings to resolve default controls in order to avoid serializing a bunch of null controls instead of their actual expected bindings
- Work towards serializing bindings
- Work towards selecting a zooid to grow with the keyboard
- You can now cycle the zooid groups with menuNext/Prev buttons
- Work towards selecting the zooid to grow via gamepad
- Fix rebind UI exceptions because apparently Keyboard.current is null on the start of the game
- Hide the dialog UI in gameplayUI because it hides everything else
- Reworked input handling to not use the InputAction thingies, added default controller bindings, added some new bindings for menu navigation