Finally! Build 37 is here. Save files *should* be compatible but for best experience, i would start a new game.

The biggest (and maybe most interesting change) are the new “Platform” environments.  These battles take place on the surface of the ocean on top of the remains of some ruined facilities. These should make for some different combat situations as the levels are laid out in a completely different way than the current interior levels and will require different tactics in order to succeed.

Interested in following along with the game’s development?

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Camera controls have also been tweaked, especially the right click and drag camera movement (try it or reverse it in settings!). We also reversed the drag direction since I am assured that the old “reverse” drag is what most people consider the regular drag. I guess I’m not most people. I also realized that screen shake had been disabled prior to this build, so that’s back and improved (from before?). Also, a bug that did not actually give full control of the camera to the player when the “manual control” setting was enables has now been fixed. I hope.

A new faction makes an appearance in this build: Pirate! Argh! Avast! Swashbuckle! You’ll have sub to sub combat when things go south in a Pirate encounter. These should be a fun change of pace as they are short and only require you to eliminate the enemies for now. We have some more things planned for pirates in a future build.

“Mini Boss” missions will now appear on your map and give you a bit of an extra challenge (if you want it). These missions (and the regular Boss missions) now take place in a special Arena style map that is not procedurally generated and has no Fog of War. Just beat the boss and get the heck out of there.

Some “cinematic” style text has been added to the beginning of the Boss and Pirate missions. Our long term plan is to replace all the spoken dialog in the game with this style of text. It just makes more sense from a budget perspective than voice over. We’ve got a lot of plans to make this a nice system to help develop the characters and give each one a specific personality.

Smaller Changes in Build 37:

• Refactored how missions get created/allocated to make them less random such that you won’t see a lot of the same mission type in a given area.
• Each interior station you visit will now have a more distinct theme related to the original purpose that the creators gave it. We call this the “facility” type. Some facilities we have in this build are the Computing Station, Medical Facility and the Robot Assembly area.
• The cover that you see in facilities now has some connection to the enemy faction living there
• UI work to update the loading screen and some of the modals to have a better style and more cohesion between them

Build 37 Bug fixes

• A lot of soft locks should be resolved now
• Some camera bugs
• Skill bugs (like enemies using covering fire on themselves)
• Weapon Bugs (notably the grenades not damaging cover)
• Boss not spawning on final level

What’s coming next in Build 38?

We’ll make a blog post next week about the major Character Class Refactoring we have been planning for a few months now. We’ve got 8 different main classes planned out, plus there will be 4 enemy faction classes that can be unlocked. It’s possible not all of the character classes will make the cut and at least 1 or 2 will have to be unlocked.

We’ll be working on another set of new maps and some more Facility types to keep things interesting. Farms and Power generation are the plan for facilities and some new “cramped” interior spaces for the maps.

Another big change will be that the text encounter outcomes will start affecting the missions. This feels like another good future blog post topic. Picture events like “It’s a trap!” resulting in your characters being deep in an enemy installation and having to get back to the sub. For larger teams, we might even split you up, increasing the challenge.

We will also be looking for some volunteers to help us test out new Steam specific stuff like Achievements and Cloud saves. Keep an eye out for an email!

Bonus video

A long form video of a battle in the new platform environments