Hey everyone! I am here once again to share a new update for the demo. I have been focusing a lot on improving the onboarding and accessibility of the game and in that spirit I have fleshed out the tutorial much more with dedicated tutorial levels for each mechanic. I am still adding levels, but the core lessons should be enough to teach the foundations of the game. I think it will be a massive improvement over the last version.
I also have been finding areas where the mechanics have gotten a little bit bloated and confusing. I decided to cut nutrient completely because they added complexity without much benefit. I also clarified the core game loop in career mode to be an arena-style RTS where you capture your opponent's germinal zone to win. A player must hold a germinal zone or will be eliminated after 30 seconds. The compound system is still being built but it's already functional as an organic chemistry simulation, where each compound is a molecule composed of atoms, and the functional groups determine their reactivity (simplified for gameplay, of course. This is not an accurate chemistry simulation, it's meant to be fun!). The economy has taken a bit of a back seat, but now that rival labs are a thing I plan to make the economy simulation deeper. Strain value comes from how successful your strains are at capturing nodes on the BioNet. You will notice the UI has been simplified and looks different. This will not be the final UI in the early access release, I already have plans to give it all a face lift. This is a big update... so there's a lot I probably left out. Just go try it out and let me know what you think :). Thanks for playing! Full Changelog: v0.4.4:
TUTORIAL V4:
* Added mechanic-by-mechanic tutorial levels (WIP - more tutorials
Mechanics:
* BioNet core loop: eliminate rival labs by claiming their germinal zones
* Removed nutrients, food is now one particle type only
* Rooted cells can now move, but very slowly
* Fog of War: unscouted substrate cannot be seen
* Cryobank functions as the player's loadout, slots can be added at a biomark cost
* Deploy/victory loop: deploy cells from cryobank at game start, and on victory, preserve evolved strains in the vacant slots
* Direct particle placement removed from career mode, replaced by directly dosing cells
Compounds:
* Added organic molecule simulation layer
* Compound molecules are simulated down to the atom
* pH differences and special compound characteristics drive reactions
* Cells absorb compounds and compounds can be extracted from them.
Augmentations:
* Progression rewards augmentations
* Passive augmentations apply to all cells all the time
* Activated augmentations must be manually activated and trigger on selected cells only
* Limited to 4 slots
Maps:
* Added authored maps. Currently just ships with one, more will be added very soon.
Rival labs:
* Added rival lab AI. Still in the process of training and tuning them.
UI:
* Added status symbols to indicate various cell conditions such as pH damage, toxic damage, etc
* Simplified
SFX:
* Added various sfx