Hey all! I know a lot of you have been waiting eagerly to try out Build 42 and it's finally here. So much new and updated stuff that I'll just dive right in.

Well, first I'll mention that we will be appearing at MomoCon in Atlanta again this year (May 24-27)! We're part of an amazing lineup of games at the Unity Atlanta User Group booths (yes, there are 2). It's an honor to be alongside some great games like TwinCop (GA Award Finalist 2018), Neon the Ninja (early access masocore platformer), Voiceball (alt.ctrl.GDC finalist) and Arbiter (co-op VR game). If you are going to the con, please stop by and say hey!

Now on the Build 42 details... but one note first... we had to reset the save data for this update so you will be forced to start a new game. So much changed that it's worth it to start over anyway!

Character Class Update

Wrecker
We covered the Wrecker in the Build 42 preview post last week but we should mention that their preferred weapon class (Heavy) has had some improvements since then to it’s effects. Updated GIF with the Shadowfury (tier 3 ballistic minigun)

Warden
Protector of the weak. The Warden is a defensive focused class whose skills are focused on providing protection and taking fire for other allies. They are a kind of variation on the tank that is probably best built with high health to be able to take a lot of punishment while others dish it out. When fully leveled, the Warden can be very dangerous by laying down covering fire to any enemy who fires on an ally.

Skills:

• Distraction - Draw enemy fire for a few turns 
• Hunker Down - Automatically defend if moving on both actions 
• Covering Fire - Fire on enemy that attacks an ally if in range

Remove Saboteur
We love the Saboteur class in principle but unfortunately, in game development, sometimes you have to make hard choices. The Saboteur really needed the Stealth system to be more fully realized in order to be an effective class and there is unfortunately just not time to do so before our launch. We could possibly bring them back in a post launch content update !

Rebalancing

We touched on this topic in the Build 42 preview but there are a few areas to cover in more detail.

Walls As Cover
We’ve heard the feedback: some of the interior level rooms are just not fun as there is sometimes a lack of cover. One idea we’ve been toying with for a while is to make the corners of walls function as high cover. We’ve added it into this build with the ability to “lean” around walls and fire. If this seems to play well, we’ll consider adding an additional firing animation (or something) for the lean. 

Fog of war also clears around walls when you are on a corner, allowing you to safely get a look down hallways. I think this is the really interesting change and the one that has most affected my play style.

Overwatch
I also reworked overwatch as the previous implementation would take some bad shots most of the time. Now I calculate the hit chance at every waypoint (tile) on the moving character's path. I exclude the start and end and any location that is lower than a base percentage. The I choose a random value from the remaining locations. This ensures that the shot is always reasonable but sometimes really good. We will see how it plays but it seems solid so far in testing.

Trapped Containers
Another interesting change is that we now will spawn different amounts of enemies depending on the situation. One such situation is that the loot containers are sometimes booby trapped, which makes an alarm go off alerting enemies to your presence. We will continue to work on these types of situations and refining them to match with situational dialog in the encounters as well. This will be a focus for the next few builds.

HUD and UI Update

New Font
The old font that has been in use for a while (Homespun) had a really interesting cyberpunk feel to it but it just wasn’t “pixely” enough. After seeing this excellent collection of pixel fonts available on itch.io by Chevy Ray, we decided to try some of them out. I really liked Crates the best so that’s what we are going with! For this update, I also wrote a nice editor utility to swap fonts in Textmesh Pro components in Unity. Let me know if you are interested in using it in your project to try out some different fonts in your UI!

HUD Cleanup
The HUD has been redesigned a few times already but after seeing the Phoenix Point demo we had some new ideas. This delayed Build 42 by a few days but I think the change was worth it as the presentation is much cleaner overall. This will still be a work in progress so love to hear feedback or criticism!

UI Scaling Updated
While I was reworking the HUD, I also took the opportunity to re-scale the entire UI. Previously it was optimized for 720p which was a terrible choice as most people play on 1080p or on a smaller laptop screen or something. Now the elements stay a constant size on the HUD and just reposition on the screen. I tested quite a few configurations but I'm sure there is a resolution or two that will look weird, so please let me know about your experience. I made a similar change on the rest of the UI's also. Hopefully this results in the pixel art elements looking better.

New Items

Tons of new items were added in this update. We really fleshed out the medical items, adding two items that can revive downed characters and several types of nanites. Quite a few of the items have in game sprite representations now. We also have assigned each weapon to be either Ballistic (fires bullets) or Energy (lasers, plasma, lightning) and created upgrade items specific to each type.

Item Icon Sprites:

Here’s a complete item list!