When I started working on this update, my initial plan was to make save/load support and then move on to the basic evolution rebalance. Unfortunately, that was not meant to be. I knew that savegame support was a serious task but it turned out it was even more serious then I thought. Without going into too much technical details, my favorite highly dynamic method of programming does not gel well with serialization/deserialization (in fact I will have to keep that in mind in the future). The saving wasn't that hard but restoring the correct state after loading the game was a much harder task. In the end I've had to rewrite chunks of low/mid-level code to make the game state serializable and properly restorable so I fully expect there to be savegame related bugs. iwanPlays helped a lot with the QA so it seems stable enough but there's just a myriad of possibilities some of which may result in the game not loading correctly. If you notice any bugs after you've loaded the game, please send the exceptions.txt file and the savegame itself to me with the description because we all love these broken savegames, do we? :)
Anyway, following my general philosophy on this game, saving has an associated difficulty. That's right, you've read me correctly, easy difficulty allows the player up to 10 saves per game in any point, normal only up to 3 and you can only save in the sewers, while hard difficulty limits you to a single save total, also only in the sewers. Bonus points to you if these numbers - 10/3/1 seem familiar... Speaking of difficulty, now you can select overall difficulty in the options menu and the game will automatically choose it for you when necessary.
At this point you're probably wondering, what's this spoon mode that was mentioned earlier? Well, it's the result of a short discussion on the Steam forums with the players. The game is brutally hard for some and they want to relax some of the gameplay restrictions just to have some fun. This would, of course, break the balance so I've decided to add a hidden options menu where you can enable these changes in the game. It's hidden mostly because the new players are not supposed to enable anything in it right from the start. After enabling any of the two flags, the game gets officially spooned and you will have to disable the flags and start a new one to play like you're supposed to again. To get into the spoon mode options, you need to click on the OPTIONS menu title letters to form the word SPOON. At this point the hidden menu opens. There are only two options there now but I encourage you to ask for more on the forums. If it's not too hard or problematic, I'll implement it.
That's all I have for now.
Changes:
- Save/load games support with a difficulty setting
- Steam overlay should work now, at least on Windows. Untested on Linux
- All NPCs now have fixed art chosen on game start. Before they've regenerated every time they've spawned (and noone noticed!)
- Easy evolution difficulty starting improvements reduced to 2
- Hard survival difficulty setting now disables the rescue dog
- New icons for female cops, courtesy of iwanPlays
- New icons for kevlar armored and fully armored blackops, courtesy of iwanPlays (now you can distinguish between the two visually)
- Random delay introduced in sound playing, hopefully reducing the problems when a lot of AIs shoot at the same time
- Overall difficulty setting in the options
- Super-secret spoon mode
- No energy loss on habitat death, habitat maximum count does not decrease
- Open all basic mutations at start
Fixes:
- Sound should no logger stop in long sessions