Hi everyone,
This month we’ve been primarily focusing on all of the associated tasks surrounding our Tech system, which is replacing Passive Gear. If you missed the post that describes what Tech is, you can catch up here:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1252680/view/544495527868237649
We’ve been working on a collection of Unique Tech – this is the purple ones that have a standalone and more powerful impact (previously we’d been working on the Stackable – i.e. blue ones).
You gain new Tech every battle and make your selection from a random pool on the After Action Report, so we’ve re-done this screen to allow that functionality as well as sprucing it up:
The above is still work-in-progress, but gives you an idea on how you choose your Tech (hovering over an icon will give information on each piece of Tech in a tooltip). You can equip up to five pieces of Tech in the Loadout menu, so can lean into certain play styles accordingly.
The blank “Optional Objective” is part of an accompanying system we’re currently working on. The idea here is twofold:
First, it’ll provide an extra layer of gameplay variety in combat through optional challenges.
Secondly, achieving these objectives provides a bonus you can use in the After Action Report when you choose your Tech. For example re-rolling the current selection or allowing you to make two choices – essentially giving you more control on the sort of build you want to craft in your run.
Because we’ll message Optional Objectives in the HUD – and we had a few feedback points we wanted to address – we’ve done another pass on how this looks:
We’ve got a new wave icon, changed the colours on the health and armour bars, added some improved functionality and messaging on the ammo and secondary fire modes in the bottom-right, and only have one instance of the word “BREACH” in the top-left. It’s not shown here, but we’ve moved the breach timer to be just below the middle centre underneath the phase banners.
One thing you may have noticed in the screenshots above is that our font has changed. There were a few aspects with the previous font that were problematic, whether that be how it was hard to read when smaller through to how the upper case ‘D’ and ‘O’ looked too similar – for example the “RETURN TO POD” message basically looked like it was “RETURN TO POO”. While that may have amused my immature mind, it was a good time to address those problems with a focus on legibility.
A lot of the new Tech utilises status effects, so we’re also working on fleshing them out. Their damage over time is varied and has additional gameplay effects to further differentiate them. For example:
- Burn deals damage rapidly. It can spread between targets that are close. It can be extinguished if affected by venting and if the player repeatedly crouches and stands in quick succession.
- Poison (which is being renamed to Toxic) performs low damage over a long period. It increases firearm spread by a % amount (more for enemies than the player). It damages armour at a greater rate than health and can be cured by healing either via dispenser or the Stim.
- Bleed gives high damage in stabs over a short lifetime and moving above a certain speed increases the frequency of damage. While suffering from Bleed you are also weakened to other damage (the enemies even more so). Bleed can be stopped immediately by healing and if you’re wearing armour it won’t even take effect.
- Enemies have immunities and weaknesses to certain status effects (for example the drones suffer increased damage from burning, the creatures that spit green projectiles won’t suffer Toxic damage)
Aside from the above, now that we’ve implemented playtest feedback Alex has been arting up the two new levels (Conduit and Hab), here’s a WIP screenshot of the former:
Sean has been doing some early balancing work on the equipment and enemies – with lots more to come as we look to get MU4 on a Beta Branch for testing!
From the Community
Another couple of posts this month from our community. Discord user Furious George posted this for when they roll a Chasm defense:
I’m sure everyone has a level they feel something similar :)
While fellow Discord member Fritz X posted this video regarding the general vibes for listening to the game music:
Watch on YouTube
Probably a good time to say that yes, the soundtrack will be released – we’ve still got a few more tracks coming though, so we’ll wait until those are done before putting it out.
As ever, keep the cool submissions coming!
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Thanks for your continued support!
