Space Grunts 2 News

Here's the first big update for Early Access, and it comes with a long list of tweaks, changes, improvement and a few big new features. The big features are the passive-skills, which are extra cards you can acquire when you level-up in experience (XP). Then before you teleport into the next level, you'll get the choice to pick one out of three randomly chosen cards.

The second big change is the Tricorder card, which is now shown on "first-encounters" with new aliens, items, objects, etc. This will show you a dialog with info on the items and aliens. Still fleshing out the information to show there, but it's a good start. It's also the start of the whole Codex feature that's coming!

So there you have it, check below's full-changes list if you want, and keep in mind that this also means the game will have it's first price-increase next Tuesday (October 8th) so this is the last week you can get the game at this deep discount.

Newly added stuff:

• add: Tricorder card now replaces "Skip" card on first encounters, throws up a dialog with stats+info on entity being scanned
  
• added: passive-skills - between levels (available with every level-up skill point)
  
• added: Passive-skill: Quick-teleport
  
• added: Passive skill: Heavyarmor - halves damage and discards self-inflicted damage
  
• added: Passive skill: Rager - increase HP with 1 after every alien kill (in battle)
  
• added: Passive skill: Boring - big chance your opponent falls a sleep when entering the battle
  
• added: Passive skill: Calming - angry creatures will calm down near you
  
• added: Passive skill: Dispenser - dispenses spores making creatures lose your smell (harder to track you)
  
• added: sickness status to player (when bitten or near sick creatures)
  
• added: passive/skip cards now have their own color
  
• added: pathfinding (mouse) now avoids hazardous floors if possible (acid, burns)
  
• added: Powertool - +1 attack on full deck of cards
  
• added: renamed "Leave" to "Retreat" and gave new icon
  

Fixed and changes:

• fixed: alien-attack card images now show "attack" state
  
• fixed: got too many skillpoints (or not deleted after using one?)
  
• fixed: skip-card now properly reshuffles the cards to the end of your deck
  
• fixed: various bugs with card-deck count not being correct and cards missing
  
• fixed: "quick-teleport" special card shouldn't kick in when energy == 0
  
• tweak: wrench-item now available more often
  
• tweak: enemies don't level up fast enough now (low hp and low attackskills)
  

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

A little Let's play session of me playing the game and giving some comments and info on certain decisions made and things that need changing over the coming version.

This was with build v0.0.14 so things might have changed since! :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQl7LvCM3qw

So the video basically covers where I am with the project, how much I have done so far and if I’ll make the deadline.. BUT .. what’s the big stuff still left?

One of the major things that I still need to do is get some intelligence into the enemies. The way I’ve written the card-battle code right now the opponent really just does two things:

are we being attacked? check our defense-percentage and based on that either defend or just attack OR idle.
are we playing the first card? check our attack-percentage, and attack or be idle based on that!
So yeah, that’s not very intelligent, and altho it all works for the easier and early alien encounters, in the later levels and for more harder opponents we need something much better. My plan is to give the aliens a set of defend, attack and special item cards (like healing) in their arsenal based on their type (alien, humanoid, robotic).

I’m not giving them a full deck of cards, which would of course be the most fair and realistic way to do the card-battling, but instead we are “cheating” a bit on this, since the opponent will be more free to choose which card it will be playing from it’s (very) limited set of cards and based on percentages.. but as with all games, you don’t want realistic enemies, you want capable and interesting enemies, and this should accomplish that!

So that’s one of the big things I’ll be working on after I’m back from my little vacation in a week or so, and I hope to have it up and running before I push out the early-access version!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N48bSzXfgMY

Riiiiight, another week filled with changes and improvements.. but I also kinda covered it all in this weeks video! So it doesn’t leave much to talk about in this blog post.

Something that wasn’t on the list was a bit of bug-fixing with the card system. At some point during my play-test session I noticed that the attack/defends stats that were mentioned weren’t getting played and that I either did much more attack points towards the aliens, or that they maybe didn’t defend enough.

Due to me having re-done the card system a few times, I guess some bugs got in there and altho obvious if you really look at it, these bugs weren’t as obvious when I just did a play session and not checked the card-stats and alien-stats on every turn because I kinda figured it was all working correctly!

I also talked about the plant and spore problem in the video, but even tho I sort-of fixed the issue, I’m still not really happy with how the plants work. In Space Grunts one there was just the one type, and it could go either way.. which was much more tactical to base your decision on. How the plants work now, you’ll basically make a mistake once (hit a poison-spore plant) and from that moment on you’ll simply try to avoid those plants.

A few solutions I’m pondering now are:
1) Have more plant variation, so not just 3 types but maybe 12 types, some good, some bad.
2) Have plants be much more rare than they are now, and maybe limit every “world” (area) to just one plant-type. Down-side is that you’re screwed if that plant is the poison one.
3) Have much more “spore-effects” so that it’s possible that multiple, or even all, plant types have semi-positive effects.

A combination of 1 and 3 might be the best way to go, but that’s something I’ll just have to try and see how it plays.

Anyway! That’s it for this weeks blog!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Qma7a1IWk

Never, ever, give somebody a green-screen to play around with.. in all honesty: I have wasted a bit too much time playing with that green-screen for the video!

BUT I still had a decently productive week, besides creating all the plant life I showed in the video, there’s a few more interesting changes made to the game this week. First of those is damaged-items! It’s now possible for items to be damaged, right now that means they will deal 1 damage to you if you use them in a battle. But it’s very likely I’ll put some more variation in the effects that damaged items have.

Code wise it was pretty easy to implement, since all tiles in the game map already track damage values, I just made the pickup-item entity test for a high enough damage value, and if true, then item is damaged. So pretty much all items that get caught in a bomb-explosion or fire will be damaged.

I’ve also been trying to streamline the use of items/cards a bit more. There were still a lot of cards that you could use freely at any tile on the map. But most of those cards had some sort of effect on your battles with aliens. So I now moved them around a bit and changed the usage of some of the cards slightly so that all these cards are now required to use in a battle – meaning the player has to make more tactical decisions on when to use those items (because you will be in a fight!).

Besides the plant life I drew a bunch of new enemies to encounter, most of those are of the humanoid type which means they will be using the same type of weapons as you! joy!