Dev Transmission (April 2024)
Hi everyone, welcome to the latest Dev Transmission – for those new to our community it’s a monthly roundup of what we’ve recently been working on.
We’ve got a huge list of feedback from all of your posts and reviews – once I’d finished collating everything it was very pleasing to see that as a community you want very similar things from the game and are closely aligned with what we have planned for Early Access.
Here’s some of what we’ve been up to:
[h3]Ship Launch Screen and Campaign Length/Difficulty![/h3]
We’ve started work on a new menu that will be displayed before your ship takes off from Earth. On this screen you’ll choose several options and it’ll be the foundation that a lot of future Early Access updates will plug into (like co-op and ship selection).
For Major Update 1 though, this will be where you choose your escape route, which informs run length and difficulty.
We know that our community has different difficulty requirements – some people find the game too hard, some too easy and the difficulty curve can have too much friction. These escape route options allow us to cater to those varying differences in a way that doesn’t break other areas of the game. For example, easier difficulties will be shorter, balanced appropriately and only have a certain tier of equipment to find, but provide a smoother challenge for those that need to ease into the game. As the run difficulties step up there will be more sectors to fight through and greater tiers of equipment to collect. This also allows us to eventually open up hardcore difficulty modes to challenge those who are currently dominating.
[h3]New Enemies![/h3]
Enemy reinforcements are inbound! These new enemies will allow us to expand some campaign lengths beyond two sectors.
I’ll try not to spoil things now as we’ll show more of these in due course, but one enemy that is being expanded is the Heavy enemy that wields the plasma minigun. We’re providing different tiers of this like we have with other bipedal enemy types and here’s some concept art of the lower and higher tier versions (the current version is seen in the corner):
This enemy will also be getting some weapon variants – which we’ll reveal later along with the other new enemies.
[h3]New Equipment![/h3]
If the enemy is getting reinforcements it only feels fair for the SENTRY Defense Program to provide new equipment to help defend their ship.
We’ve added a couple of low tier deployables that were in the demo but didn’t make the full game, and designed some new deployables to fill missing gaps – in particular one that is good at dealing with flying enemies :)
We’ve also designed some new active and passive gear so expect to see more of these in Major Update 1, alongside a couple of new weapons. We’ve focused on getting one in-game first before we decide which one to make next, but here’s some early concept art of the Riot Gun:
When we reveal the finished version of this weapon you can refer back to this image to see which elements we progressed into the final design.
[h3]New Levels![/h3]
We’re planning new levels to add to the current ship layout, which puts us in a good place to create new ship layouts in future major updates.
Sean has made one of these levels thus far, dubbed “The Crossing”. We’re testing it in greybox format and once we’ve finessed it we’ll pass it over to Alex to do the art, but here’s a work-in-progress shot:
[h3]Optimisations![/h3]
Adam has been doing optimisations and you should see improvements in combat. While the game will always run slower with 30 enemies on screen than 3, for those final wave moments where there’s a lot of AI around any dips you experienced shouldn’t dip as low.
There’s more juice to be squeezed out here, and we’ll continue to optimise throughout Early Access – while you’re waiting on those enhancements, check out this post here for performance tips.
[h3]Other stuff![/h3]
We’ve been doing lots of balancing, bug-fixing and polish tasks and working through feedback that you’ve posted on the forums, reviews etc. I’ll list these in the changelog when Major Update 1 releases.
[h3]From the Community![/h3]
Now that the game is out, I thought it might be nice to finish off the monthly Dev Transmissions with some cool content from the community.
First up is Discord user Jajomba, who sent this clip of a particularly skillful shot (that I repurposed with his permission into a YouTube Short): https://youtube.com/shorts/jjYhs3IaAMc
And finally, some lovely fan art from Discord user TheCartoon1st. They drew their own SENTRY, and then imagined what a battle-scarred veteran would look like:
If you have any of your own gameplay captures demonstrating impressive skill or cool fan art send them to me on Discord!
Keep the feedback coming! It goes into a big list we’re keeping track of and improves the game. You can reach us on all these places:
The additions outlined above are going into Major Update 1, and we’ll continue working on these plus more during May. We have A LOT more planned for the game in future Major Updates throughout Early Access, of which you can read about some of our plans here:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1252680/view/5921742839579227575
In the Roadmap we estimated each Major Update would take somewhere between 2-3 months, as this is the cadence our last Early Access game did with the same team size (one artist, one designer, one programmer). Thus far that estimate is still looking accurate, but for those who want to test an earlier version we’ll be putting it on an opt-in beta branch a couple of weeks ahead of release – we’ll let you know when that’s ready.
Thanks for all the support and if you haven’t done so already, please leave a Steam review!
