Thanks to everyone that has shown interest and thanks for all the wish-listings - it has been a very interesting time seeing this early version of the game be played by real players, gauge first reactions, watch play-through's on YouTube. It has allowed some very fast iterations of some minor things that was left out but could have a big impact of completely new players, and that is one of those aspects that is hardest to predict and test out using known testers. It can only be found by actually seeing first-time players.
It has also been very interesting to see the reactions to the concept and game-mechanics. While a lot of the finer aspects of it is partly clouded in a lack of a manual or wiki-pages as of yet, some players have managed to find them just from playing, which highlights two things; there is several decent pieces of mechanics in the game, but it is also very important to make it clear to more players what they are so no-one miss them or is left confused. A very interesting area to improve in.
There is also some adjustments to the game-mechanics planned - one interesting area here is the area of positive vs negative feedback-loop. More specifically, if a player has issues and is still learning or struggling, one of their Operators may die in an encounter, and will remain died when transitioning to the next level. This leaves them worse off in future encounters. While this harder game-play will be maintained for the Hard Difficulty, for Normal and Easy I will later on introduce the concept of Down But Not Out, where an Operator can be Revived by another Operator that is up, during or after en encounter, with a small amount of their health left (depending on difficulty level).
There is also some other interesting changes being sketched out that we will talk about later.
Here is a summary of the patch-notes from the past week:
EARLY ACCESS BUILD 5
* Added Brightness Option to the Options Dialog, adjusting the camera exposure level
* Added Informative Titles to Character Creation's three stages
* Adjusted Screenshot Mode (F11) to now also hide Minimap
* Increased banding-dithering for smoother low-light luminosity transitions
* Increased the number of samplings used for Depth of Field
* Increased quality of Depth of Field rendering pass
* Fixed material issue for unlitBlack
* Fixed light cookie bleed for all flashlights as seen on the minimap on some vegetation
* Adjusted some bullet-hole materials for better color-matching and nicer normal-mapping
* Fixed edge-case where Operator and Monster animation-speed wasn't properly reset between state-changes
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EARLY ACCESS BUILD 4
* Added Tool Tip to Selected Operator UI
* Added Option for showing the Tool Tip - default setting is to show it
* Fix slight camera drift when holding activator (default MMB / Left Shift) but not actively moving the mouse
* Fix issue when Look and Interact's Orders carried across rounds could allow one to interact with Actors from a distance
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EARLY ACCESS BUILD 3
* Added Volume slider to the options menu, impacting both in-game and menu audio
* Deactivated Monsters saying lines in Build, useful for debugging but somewhat breaking narrative when playing
* Adjusted a lot of long sentences said by Operators to now be row-broken for easier reading
* Adjusted Camera height to 4.9m from 5.0m
* Adjusted Mouse-scroll tick to 40cm from 50cm, and key-press (def. C/V) to 80cm from 1m, for adjusting Camera height
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EARLY ACCESS BUILD 2
* Added a Options menu and enable it for Main Menu and In-game Menu
* Added higher quality grave models and replace out the existing ones in the levels
* Improved BloodRock and BloodDust effects
* Fixed showing Continue (Main Menu) and Reload from Savegame (In-game menu) options if lacking a savegame
* Adjusted encryption on the savegame files
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