Hello friends!
Since Update 10 we’ve continued to focus on addressing the most common (or reported) points of frustration (recent and old). We’ve touched many areas of the game to fix and improve as much as we could. We hope you enjoy this update!
Update 11 includes a 🎽 New Trainee Mode and Improvements in these areas:
⚛️ Physics and Weapon-Environment Collision
🤸 Class Re-Balancing
💣 Weapon Feel
💨 Teleportation Movement Polish
📲 Chip Usage and One-Handed Play
🏞 Level Layouts and Ladders
✊ Stability and Consistency
Trainee Mode
Our biggest addition for this release is a new Trainee Mode.
A common point of frustration from certain players is that the game environments are too repetitive. This is an unfortunate quirk of roguelike games where, if you die often, you end up never seeing some of the later areas. We want those players to have an opportunity to experience the breadth of levels and environments we offer.
In Trainee Mode, you can continue from the same level you died from, and in this manner, get to see more of the later game levels. The trade-off is that there are no leaderboards, no achievements can be unlocked and no class unlock progression. We’re quite curious how this new mode will be received.
Weapon Environment Collisions
Weapon collisions with fixed environment objects are now DISABLED by default. Weapon collisions have been a big source of frustration from some of our players and we’re excited to finally be able to offer this behavior as an option. This “minor” improvement involved quite a bit of work, adjusting every existing environmental object in the game.
For players who want to stick with the original behavior, simply go to “Settings->Weapons->Environment Collisions”.
We don’t usually change a default behavior with an update, but based on our internal testing, it feels like the right way to go.
Class Re-Balancing
We’ve re-balanced the Sniper and Grenadier classes’ unlock progression to make them feel less grindy/ridiculous. Thank you for the feedback on these, it’s given us ideas for further (future) improvements.
Weapon Improvements
The Grenade Launchers have been improved to be more effective and fun. The fuse times on the grenades are now much shorter (sticky grenade 4s -> 1s, contact grenade 3s -> 0.1s).
Shotguns now have a subtle kick-back when pumped.
Teleportation Movement
The teleportation system has been improved in several ways:
- It now accurately jumps to the target on the floor
- There’s subtle movement filtering of the aim target
- We fixed a bug that took the wrong position to offset the aim
Settings Improvements
We’ve made a few (player-requested) improvements to the settings:
The “Fall down” setting now applies to all types of falling down (off a ledge, after using the grapple hook), not just when teleporting off the edge of raised floor. Players can choose between Instant, Linear speed or Normal gravity-acceleration.
Players can now toggle on/off the display of damage numbers.
Chip Usage and One-Handed Play
This is long overdue, but you can now equip a chip in the hand that’s holding it by simply pulling the trigger. Sweet Surrender is now officially playable one-handed. This improvement also introduced one of the silliest bugs we’ve ever seen, where you could equip all sorts of weapons into your chip slots.
We’ve also fixed a lot of edge cases where certain chip effects wouldn’t stack or work properly, especially in the reloading, time slow down and EMP effects.
Environment Improvements
The Sewers were the only environments to use ladders, and they seem to cause endless problems. We never found a fun way to use ladders in the game, so we decided to remove all ladders from the Sewers and replace them with teleport jumping pads.
In the Mines area, we’ve cleaned up a few rooms that occasionally placed an annoying amount of debris in your path.
Physics Improvements
We made minor (but important) improvements to make the interactions physics feel more consistent:
- We (finally) added collision marks for bullets that hit doors
- Weapons dropped by enemies now react to bullets (they used to stay static)
New Achievements
We’ve added new achievements, including a handful for funny/silly deaths. In the process of testing some of these, we discovered (and fixed) a crazy bug that left you in a weird zombie state if you were killed by a bullet deflected off a crystal!
Moving Forward
Thank you for your continued feedback and support. We still have a few updates planned for Sweet Surrender, so stay tuned for that as well as our future games.
As always, you can keep track of our plans in the Public Roadmap and stay in touch with us and the community on our Discord.
We also want to thank super-fan Shep for creating the fan art used in the header image for Update 11! ♥️♥️♥️
Here’s the full changelog for Update 11:
Improvements
- New weapon-environmental collision option
- Improved collision layers of all environmental and prop objects in homebase, mines, slums, sewers and industrial areas.
- Improved weapon collision shapes
- bHaptics sleeve feedback support for weapons, items and chips
- WIP: new Continue button that allows players to continue from the level they died
- Decluttered derelict mineshaft rooms to reduce objects in your path
- Smoothed teleport pointer estimation
- Re-balanced Sniper and Grenadier class progression unlocks (should be easier to achieve)
- Reduced grenade bullet fuse durations (1s for sticky grenade, 0.1s for normal grenade)
- Player can now equip a chip on the hand they are holding by pulling the trigger
- Door frames now have proper bullet collisions
- For smooth turning, scale turning speed to joystick strength
- Massively increased Sewers bridge opening speed
- Added detailed logs on player actions (items pick-up, drops and uses) and VR device used
- Dropped Enemy weapons now behave physically (you can shoot them)
- Improved enemy AI and navmesh navigation, especially around jump pads
- Boss enemy improvements
- New trainee class where players continue from the same level after death (but without achievements, leaderboard or progression unlocks)
- Improved deadzone for joystick rotation
- Improved units sticking to their navmeshagents
- Replaced ladders with jump pads in all sewer rooms
- Added chargebot behavior with warning indicator and better charge path generation
- Performance: Deactivate vignettes fully when their alpha is close to zero (was causing unnecessary overdraws)
- Performance: reduce mining walls overdraw
- Option: you can now show or hide damage numbers
- Added new death and trainee achievements
- Shotguns now have small kick-back on pumping
- Added a “Leave a Review” button
Fixes
- Improved reset behavior for edge cases, better handling in slums elevator
- Fixed logging issues on PC version
- Regenerated meshes with reduced polycount for all homebase assets, all mines assets, all slums assets, industrial medical assets, modern city server room, sewers tiles and decorations
- Fixed credits in server room
- Prevent spider bots bullets from colliding with itself
- Prevent spider bot-hive collisions
- Fixed a handful of collision issues
- Fixed a handful of null exceptions (during weapon placement, bullet particles, bullet replacement chips)
- Fixed charge behavior for Big Red robot
- Cleaned up various log spam
- Fixed missing modifiers in mesh atlas.
- Fixed shading issues on some slums meshes
- Improved level generation time (by fixing null issues in room list)
- Fixed occasional missing health packs in vending machines
- Fixed broken health stations in occasional Mines rooms
- Fixed potential Reaper class unlock issues
- Chargebot’s actions are now executed in the correct order
- Fixed a bunch of incorrectly serialized prefabs which previously caused all sorts of weirdness
- Fixed enemy weapons overwriting collision layers on pick-up
- Fixed flickering health dispensers
- Wooden planks are no longer melee weapons
- Menu laser pointer no longer disappears if you press X or A
- Fixed a long-standing dash/teleport offset position problem where it would only work correctly if you never move around in your real life space.
- Fixed teleportation so that it jumps exactly to the location you aimed for, and not a meter/yard shorter
- Fixed temporary speed buffs removing permanent ones
- Fixed headshot reload chip not working properly on some weapons (sniper, laser sight handgun)
- Fixed time slowing inconsistency bug