0.3.5 — Brand, Focus & Splatter
A polish pass on everything you look at: the company mark is now part of the world, screens behave like real hardware, and the lab grenades finally leave a mess behind.
The Echo Mates mark is in the world
- On the gear. The mark is worn into the paintwork of the supply van's curtain and cab doors, the cargo truck's sides and lid, and the crate walls — projected into the surface itself, not stuck on as a floating sign, so it curves with the panel and scuffs like paint should.
- On the screens. Dark monitors run it as a standby screensaver, it sits behind both tablets, heads the lift terminal, opens the shop billboard's slide reel, and watermarks the readout in the truck's cargo bay.
Screens act like hardware
- Walk up to a terminal and it powers on with a CRT snap; walk away and it drops back to standby. The lift terminal and the base build terminal both do it.
- Base stations have live monitors. While your tablet is out at the research table, the chip rack or the lab rack, the station's TV lights up and runs its work — a spectrogram or a scope at the table, cells flashing one by one at the chip rack, synthesis curves and a bubbling flask at the lab. The picture is laid onto the TV's curved glass, not on a board in front of it.
- The build terminal now shows your stock. One cell per resource with its own icon, what you have on the shelf, and a green "+N" for whatever is sitting in the scrapper right now — load something in and the bonus climbs before the machine has finished.
Focus
- Raise the tablet, or hold an item right up to your face, and the world behind it goes out of focus instead of fighting the thing in your hands for your attention. Smooth now, too — the first version looked pixelated.
Lab grenades behave like grenades
- A lab grenade no longer pops on the first thing it clips. The throw lights a fuse; the casing is metal and bounces off walls, rattles across the floor, and only bursts when the fuse runs out — so a throw down the corridor actually lands down the corridor.
- The fuse keeps burning in your hands. Pick a live one up and you can throw it back, but nobody gives you extra time.
- Splatter. The burst now throws gobs of its contents around — acid or cryo mix sticks to the walls, ceilings and furniture it hits by their angle, and whatever flies clear lands as a small real puddle further out. Mind the spray.
Ice
- Frozen creatures actually look frozen. The ice tint now reaches the screen on their whole body instead of leaving them in their natural colours.
- Freeze to death at the base and your statue stays. You respawn, but the ice version of you is left standing in the yard — and it can be kicked over, cracked with the wrench or shattered by a thrown crate, same as any other statue.
Fixes
- Screens no longer render item pictures and icons inside black squares.
- Decal placement tightened up across the vans, the truck and the crate — no more gap between the mark and the panel it is painted on.