We are pleased to announce the availability of Early Access drop #9, build 117 on Steam! This is our last planned drop before the release of the complete game. We have a new campaign level, partial localization, and combo scoring in challenge mode! Be warned, leaderboards are reset for this drop. Let us know what you think in discussions or email us at [email protected].
Thanks for the support!
Additions
- Level 7 (Titan Workshop). This is the last SP level that will be released in Early Access.
- Partial support for German, Spanish, French, and Russian. This is very new so it’s probably a little rough. Robot and weapon descriptions and a few other screens have not been translated. If you’re a native speaker of one of these languages, let us know if you see any problems.
- Challenge Mode leaderboards contain additional data: score, favorite weapon and game time. Leaderboards reset and rank is now by score, not kill count.
- Combo score bonus in Challenge Mode for rapid kills.
- Steam Cloud Sync (for pilots, saved games, & local high scores).
- Enhanced the Training Mission.
- Hologuide can now lead the player to enemies & to energy centers.
- Command-line Switch “-VRDisplayOnly” makes it so the game will render *only* in a headset, and not on the monitor.
- New difficulty level: Insane+
- Updated enemy silhouettes on score screens
- PlayStation and Xbox controllers icon support.
- New ‘Restart Level’ option on pause and death menus.
Removals:
- Removed Matcens from the automap
- Removed pairing for axis mapping. (That is, if you map up on the joystick to forward, back won’t automatically be mapped to down.)
- Removed control to ‘Invert Y.’ Instead there’s a quick option inside the Tutorial Mission, and the menu option is still available.
- Removed 3 Achievements.
Tweaks:
- Changed Music tracks for a number of locations.
- Spiced up explosions a bit
- Updated version of Rewired (controller library)
- Updated some robot animations
- Tuned camera shake
- Added Crunch texture compression (shrinks the game size down a bit and shold help low-RAM systems a bit)
- Made Hologuide & Automap more consistent by only referring to them using those names
- Hologuide now default maps to ‘z’ on keyboard when remapping
- Changed the audio for a couple of pickups so that they’re distinct from each other.
- Updated some sign names
- Decreased light from secret items a bit (so they are more secret)
- Tutorial messages will only show up once per pilot now
- Faster fade-off for damage flash
- No more live-forever debris
- Changed Missile Pod pickup model
- Renamed Checkpoint Saves to Autosaves. They are now created only between levels.
- Sticky flares now limited to 10 at once
- Markers & Hologuide now match the HUD color
Game Balancing
- Changed some costs of upgrades in missions
- Cyclone & Reflex use a bit more energy/shot
- Tweaks to Variant Triton & Variant Harpy
- Ammo pickups now scale by difficulty (like Armor & Energy).
- Slightly increased the health of fabricators (robot generators) on higher difficulties.
- Robots spawn a bit slower on CM Infinite.
- Armor/energy powerups give slightly less (20 on Trainee, 10 on Insane).
- Enemies do a bit more damage on Ace & Insane.
- Firing distance of enemies is now affected by difficulty level in CM
- Some CM maps can have more enemies at once (mainly for the more open levels).
- Some anti-kiting changes in CM – enemies that have been around too long may change their AI behavior.
- Changed the enemy loadout in Pipeline.
- Tweaked Armor gain from smash attack enemies.
- Changed center tunnel in Centrifuge a bit.
- Redesigned Centrifuge and Pipeline a bit.
- Insane for CM now unlocked based on score instead of kills.
Fixes:
- Sliders/Throttles will now default with 0 as the middle (so they won’t need to be calibrated to use them to control forward/back movement).
- Corrected a few errors in backers’ names in the credits.
- Fixed an issue with switching controllers.
- Fixed an issue with ‘Apply to All’ in the Controller Axis Settings menu.
- Fixed some glitchy animations and added awaken animations for all robots
Known Problems:
- Drop 8.5 saves will not work, giving an error when attempted to load.
- There are some text overlap issues in languages other than English.
- There are a handful of lines of untranslated text.
- We are looking for incorrect translations/mistranslations, and would appreciate help from multilingual backers.
NOTE: This release (Version 0.9 Build 117) does not support pilot files older than one version back; it will only load pilot files from from 0.8. If you have older pilot files, you can load them using Version 0.8 Build 94.