Hello again. I’ve gotten some feedback on the 0.4 update and have made a couple of smaller but still pretty impactful changes for this mini update. I’m pretty excited to get to them so let’s dive in.
Fixing Portals To Progress
One piece of feedback I had is that it was somewhat confusing as to when a player should be going to the next zone or not. Also if the player got a couple of specific equipment they could easily just keep jumping through portals and going deeper without really ever exploring. To change this I’ve made it so that all progressing portals start off broken and the player has to find an electric component in the level in order to fix it. There will always be 1 electric component per level tucked in a chest somewhere but you can also craft them using 30 wires and 30 scrap if you get really stuck. The result should be that you now have to explore at least a good chunk of each level before moving on to the next one.
Safe Zone In Zone 1
Another problem I saw with people playing the game is that they often would have trouble finding the safe zone or just not know where it was. Having the first lab portal in zone 2 made it so that it could be easily missed and then the player would have nowhere to store their stuff and do upgrades. I’ve now changed the safe zone to be a room you’ll find in Zone 1, the first electric component to fix a portal will also always be in the safe zone. This means it will be impossible to get to zone 2 without finding the safe zone first. Hopefully this makes the initial start a bit easier and straightforward for players.
Morse Code Sound Generation
One of the technical troubles of playing Morse in a frame rate dependent system is that on slower computers the beeps could often end up being a bit longer or shorter depending on if a particular frame happened to be longer or shorter. This meant that when playing morse code, especially at higher words per minute they could actually sound different on subsequent plays. This obviously was not great because it’s hard to decipher a code when the code isn’t being played properly. All this to say I’ve completely changed how the sound gets played and we now actually generate the sound at runtime. This means that the sound is consistent regardless of your frame rate. Also as a by product we can now tweak the frequency of the morse code in the settings screen.
Other Changes
- There’s also a couple of smaller changes listed here.
- Added Speed Boost Gadget, allowing the player to sprint longer and faster when activated.
- Changed how sprint recovery works. Before the lower stamina you had would make stamina recovery slower. This has been changed so that the longer you don’t sprint the recovery speed increases. This allows the player to get some long sprints in but in order to recover quickly, you’ll need to not sprint at all for a while.
- Made the first couple of levels have less corridor branching. This should make them easier to navigate while you haven’t built up the equipment options to better explore.
- Added more lost technology drops earlier and now gives the second equipment sooner than before.
- Better feedback in the crafting menu to show what you can and cannot afford.
- Custom visuals of item pickups for lost lost technology and electric components
- Changed held too long symbol when inputting morse code from > to (too long)
- Better Clara hit/dying sounds
- Added More Corridor variations. The hallways are no longer the exact same everywhere. You’ll probably still get lost though.
- Added some more food options. Factory Shredded Cheese and It’s Just Cheese, inspired by ShredFactor and ItsJustRaji respectively.
- A bunch of graphic changes. Turned Pixelization off but added a setting for the pixel crunch lovers.