SENTRY News

Major Update 2 Beta Test (and January Dev Transmission)

Hi everyone,

You can now play a preview of Major Update 2! Any feedback or bugs you tell us about really help us put the finishing touches to the upcoming release and are therefore greatly appreciated.

To gain access, you’ll need to switch to a beta branch:

Find SENTRY in your Steam library and right-click on it, selecting “Properties”
In the menu that pops up, choose “Betas”
Select “Beta Branch” in the “Beta Participation” drop-down list
In your Library you should see “[betabranch]” appended to the game name

When you play the new version, the most important thing to consider is that while your profile saves will carry over (i.e. all your equipment you’ve unlocked thus far), your current escape run will not – so if you’re in the middle of a run and you don’t want to lose any new blueprints you haven’t banked, reach a gate and bank them before switching to the new version.

It’s also generally good practice to back up your profile saves ahead of any Major Update, just in case you’re the one that finds an obscure bug. You can find your profile and save folder here:
C:\Users[Username]\AppData\LocalLow\Fireblade Software\SENTRY\Saves\Steam\[SteamID]

[h3]Headline Additions[/h3]
The major additions are full campaign co-op and three new levels: Storage, Chasm and Logistics. The latter was one of the levels you could play in the Combat Co-op Test.

Most of the existing levels have been reworked. Some, like Central Processing and Fuel Exchange have had comprehensive changes; others have had smaller but important adjustments, from general flow to individual deployable placements.

There’s been a lot of smaller changes too that generally improve the game or deal with popular community requests; I’ll cover everything in greater detail for the post that’ll accompany the full release of MU2.

[h3]Co-op[/h3]
Our general ethos with co-op is that you should be able to have friends dive in and out of your game as much as you want – and importantly, the client should be able to take any new equipment they find with them back to their own games (or other co-op games).

We felt this approach would be the best experience, because the alternatives (although easier to develop) would have been disappointing for the co-op partner.

Here’s some useful information to get started with co-op:

Outside of the tutorial, any game – whether it be a new or existing one – can be opened or closed to co-op. This is achieved through the co-op settings menu.
If you’re starting a new profile and want to dive straight into co-op, you can skip the tutorial. Obviously if this is the first time you’ve played SENTRY we wouldn’t recommend that though :)
The co-op settings menu can be accessed through the Pause or Ship Launch menu. If you’re playing co-op, it’ll also be viewable in the Navigator and Overview screens
You can have a co-op partner join at any point outside of combat. Similarly, your campaign isn’t tied to co-op once you start, they can leave any time and you’ll continue in Singleplayer (or can have someone else jump in).
You can matchmake co-op games marked as ‘Open’ and invite friends via the Steam overlay. We’re working to add in-game friend invites.
A co-op partner brings their own Equipment into your campaign. When you gain Equipment from a Supply Beacon, you’ll gain your own items. If your co-op partner banks this new equipment, then they’ll be able to use it in their own Singleplayer or other co-op games.
This works with the campaign and vessel unlocks too – basically if you would have unlocked it if you were playing in singleplayer, it should unlock through co-op.
New equipment that is found is only kept by the profile that found it. If a different co-op profile joins, they’ll be given enough resources to spend on equipment unlocks and upgrades so they’re not left behind.
Generally speaking, you’ll find co-op easier than singleplayer – if that’s the case, play Starfarer campaigns over Initiate.
That said, combat will be dynamically harder in co-op through the breach points during a wave. Roughly speaking, if a wave would have come from two breach points in singleplayer, it’d come from three breach points in co-op.
You can’t mute or kick co-op players yet, it’s on the way.

The update and co-op have been extensively tested by both ourselves and our Discord community, but there’s nothing like volume of players to flush out bugs – so we’re particularly keen to hear any feedback.

In order to not mix up beta branch feedback with the main game, there’s a dedicated area on the Steam forums to post your beta branch comments: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1252680/discussions/0/

We’re still busy improving the balancing and fixing bugs before Major Update 2 releases, but your feedback will really help and is appreciated.

We endeavour to respond to comments and feedback as much as we can, but rest assured that even if we don’t personally reply we do read and note everything. Here’s a bunch of useful links to where you can reach us:

Once we feel the beta branch has been sufficiently tested we’ll release Major Update 2, and my accompanying post will include the details on all the changes.

Thanks for your continued support!

Happy Holidays (and December Dev Transmission)

Hello everyone,

Our Discord Playtesters are putting the full campaign co-op through its paces, so we’re keeping a keen eye on any issues that crop up from that!

As mentioned in last month’s Dev Transmission, we’ll follow the same template as we did with the combat co-op build, where we tested with increasing group sizes until the open Steam test. This worked really well in that we ironed out a lot of issues before the majority of people got to play it.

While we’ve currently got enough testing coverage, we’ll likely welcome another swathe of Discord members into the Playtest role in January to accompany an updated co-op build, so if that’s of interest head over and keep an eye on the Announcements channel.

The Autumn and Winter sales have recently added a lot of new members to the SENTRY community, so if you’re interested in playing the combat side of co-op now there are instructions here:

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1252680/view/4438953498491486247

While co-op has been a large focus for Adam this month, we’ve still been making progress on some new features we touched on in the November Dev Transmission, including:

The vendor needed a vessel to be represented on the Navigator, so we’ve been concepting that:

Sticking with the vendor, our original plan was to just make the top half of the character for when they’re shown in the UI panel while selling their wares – however after discussion we felt it safer to make the full body to give us flexibility later (it’s a lot more efficient to make the full character in one go rather than add a bottom half down the line) – but what does that bottom half look like? Here’s what we’re currently deliberating between:

Alex has also made the character models for the three new enemies we showed concepts for last month. I got her to stick all our enemies (minus a few visual-only variants on the larger characters) in a lineup so you can see how the roster is shaping up:

We also started concepts on another new enemy, but I’ll show those once we’re further along.

[h3]From the Community![/h3]
As always, we finish off the Dev Transmission with some cool stuff from the community.

This month Discord user Waste-o-Spacebar made us laugh when he shared this clip of him and a co-op buddy placing a lot of barrels before igniting one – it goes about as well as you’d expect…

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Here’s a bunch of useful links to where you can reach us:

The end of the year is a natural time for reflection, and we’ve loved seeing how you’ve all reacted to the Early Access release of SENTRY.

Aside from people generally enjoying the game (which is ultimately why we’re all here) it’s been great to see your comments have been thoughtful, cohesive and aligned with our own plans. This helps us know we’re all pulling in the same direction. That’s important because being such a small team means we only have so much ‘muscle’, so a big thank-you to everyone who acts as a force multiplier and spends the time letting us know your feedback.

While co-op has certainly taken longer than we’d like, we’d rather not rush such an important feature and risk disappointing everyone who is keen to play it (this approach has thus far paid dividends with the co-op combat test). We’re conscious that any delays incurred here shouldn’t impact our plans for the main game – so rest assured it won’t have a detrimental effect on the rest of SENTRY. We’d rather take a bit longer to add everything we want than stick to some arbitrary date – the game is the most important thing after all. The eagle-eyed may have noted the Early Access blurb on the store page has been updated to reflect our current thinking, changing from our original estimate to Summer 2025. We’ll update this as we hone in on full release.

We’ll be taking the week between Christmas and New Years Eve off, but I’ll be keeping an eye on the forums in case anyone needs assistance or has questions.

However you spend this time of year, everyone at Fireblade wishes you a great end to 2024 :)

Dev Transmission (November 2024)

Hello everyone, here’s the latest SENTRY news!

[h3]Co-op![/h3]
At the start of the month we launched the first public co-op test (details here), which was focused on putting the combat side of co-op through its paces. We did a lot of private testing among our Discord community before we opened this up on Steam, but it was encouraging to see that it handled the greater volume of players well – so to everyone that tested this, a massive thank-you!

While we’ve got a list of things we’d like to improve/add in future, because there weren’t any emergency issues we felt it was better to plough on with the full campaign co-op. The basic navigator and overview are all networking correctly and we’re currently deep in adding the proper menu flow. Beyond that, it’s ensuring that the progression functions as it should, for example equipment discovered (and banked) while playing in a co-op partner’s campaign should then appear in your own profile for use in future sessions (whether those be in singleplayer, joining a friend or your friend joining you).

For the combat co-op test, it worked well ironing out the issues with our lovely Discord playtesters first before rolling this out to an open test on Steam, and we’ll follow the same procedure with the campaign co-op test. So Discord peeps: keep an eye on the announcement channel in December for news on this test :)

The existing combat co-op test will be available to play until the full campaign co-op is ready.

[h3]A sneak peek![/h3]
With our sole programmer being occupied with co-op, recently Sean and Alex have been either working on new levels – one of which you’ll have seen in the combat co-op test, or queuing up content for after Major Update 2 – so I thought it might be cool for you to see just a snippet of some of what we have in the pipeline. Big caveats apply with showing early work of course – it’s likely to change, has working titles, could ultimately get rejected etc.

First up is some new equipment. The Shuriken is an active ability that bounces from target to target, while the overhead laser is a ceiling-based deployable. The Steam Jets cover too many bases at the moment, so they’ll be adjusted to perform a slightly different function (like damage-over-time) which then provides an opening for this new instant-damage-dealing trap.

Melee weapons were a popular request, so a high-frequency blade and stun-stick are the two we’re looking at making next:

Not to be outdone, the Collective have reinforcements en route:

The two flyers will be larger than the current breed. While one will perform heavy bombardments from afar, the other will boost nearby enemies. The creature on the right will have a special ability that disables nearby deployables.

We’ve picked these enemies as next up in the queue because their behavior is different from the existing roster, and should provide an additional consideration when it comes to target prioritisation – you probably don’t want to leave an enemy that boosts allies for too long, nor one that temporarily disables your defences…

Next up is another alien – but this one isn’t trying to kill you!

(we haven’t decided on the colour scheme yet)

These vendors will appear on the navigator, and visiting nodes with their vessels present will allow you to see what equipment they have for sale, which should make getting those missing weapons etc. a bit easier to obtain.

Finally – and while there’s nothing visual to accompany this – one thing you will see in Major Update 2 is that enemies now have differing escape costs – so a larger escaping enemy will do more damage to the sub-system health than a tiny one. As this nudges the difficulty higher, Sean has done some equipment rebalancing to compensate.

He’s also been adding more wave types – partly in preparation for when we do the next campaign above Starfarer – but you’ll see some of these changes bleed into the existing campaigns too.

[h3]From the Community![/h3]
We’ll finish off this post with some cool stuff from the community.

Discord user Jajomba is always digging around in the game files, so we had a good chuckle when he took our alien soldier and modded him into Bomb Rush Cyberfunk:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
If you have (or see) any cool SENTRY-related stuff, send it my way :)

Feedback is invaluable help in improving the game, so keep it coming! You can reach us on all these places:

Thanks for the support, it’s been great to see the campaign co-op coming along – but we’re equally excited about returning to the long list of things we want to improve and new features to add once Major Update 2 has been released! And just a heads up, the December Dev Transmission will be posted a bit earlier as we’ll be taking the Christmas week off.

Combat Co-op Technical Test (and October Dev Transmission)

Hello everyone, we've released a build you can opt into to play combat in co-op!

Before I dive into the details: a big thanks to those in our Discord community who have helped playtest co-op thus far, a lot of the revisions and bug-fixes have been a direct result of your feedback.

The Combat Co-op Technical Test (which is a mouthful, but an accurate description) is designed for you to help us put combat co-op through its paces and stress how it performs to a larger audience - and have fun while doing so :)

If you wish to play it, right-click the game in your Library and select "Properties", followed by "Betas". In the drop down list, select "cooptest - Public Co-op Playtesting" and you should see the branch name appear next to the game in Steam. Once you're playing, the bottom-right of the main menu should display a build ID "Co-op Playtest 0.7.25115" (or higher)

Some important information to read before diving in:

This is for combat only - the full campaign co-op is in progress and will be released in a future test.
The demo takes the form of two levels that are randomly selected when you play: an updated Mess Hall and Logistics, which outside of playtests you wouldn't have seen before. We've picked these levels because between them they cover most level systems (death pits, venting, overhead cranes that drop explosive crates)
The co-op front end menus are very minimal at the moment, they test the underlying code which is the most important thing, and the proper menus will follow along with the full campaign co-op test.
This doesn't use your main game profile and saves, so it won't impact your campaign playthroughs. It's never a bad idea to back up your saves though!
The "Find Game" option is essentially Matchmaking and is for open play with strangers.
The "Private Game" option is for you to host. Choose the "Invite Friend" option to invite someone on your friends list who owns SENTRY to play with you. I've put the game on discount this week so you can tell your friends now is an ideal time to jump in :)
The in-game voice chat has settings to change. If you're using an external source like Discord you may want to switch off the in-game chat otherwise you'll hear it twice.
If one person disconnects, the other will too. In the full campaign it'll be different because there'll always be a host, so if the client disconnects the host will continue playing their campaign.
As this is a beta, please report any bugs/feedback in the dedicated Steam forum or on our Discord.

Oh, and because this is a standalone test please don't focus too much on the difficulty as the context of the full campaign matters a lot! It's why we're referring to this as a "Technical Test" - we want to know about bugs, or anything you feel that is missing from the experience (for example, one thing on our to-do list is to add a log so you know when your partner dies etc).

We know that having standalone combat gameplay modes outside of a campaign is a highly requested feature, and we're planning on those modes being added at the end of Early Access.

As it's the end of the month, I thought I'd wrap our usual Dev Transmission into this post too - so here's what other stuff we've been doing in October:

A new level called Storage:
Tweaks from feedback on the recent new or updated levels and arting up those changes
The co-op test build is a snapshot of our latest changes, so it’ll have picked up a bunch of weapon and deployable balancing changes Sean has been making
You’ll also see that the early start bonus is gone. This was making people feel too under pressure, but will probably make an appearance in a new ship type for those that want it
There has also been some enemy balancing tweaks, with a lowered chance of soldier enemies throwing grenades. There's still a chance that grenade spam can happen, but it should be less frequent now (as much as I know some of you love “GRENADEGRENADEGRENADEGRENADE”…)
The Storm Warden’s hand cannon now has unique audio (it was previously using the alien shotgun sound effect)
With our sole programmer being wrapped up in co-op, Alex has been concepting up some future deployables and enemies to get ahead on future content – I’d love to show them as they’re very cool, however I don’t want to get ahead of myself quite yet just in case they don’t make the cut for whatever reason :)

[h3]A retweeting favour to ask[/h3]
I don’t normally ask for this sort of thing, but as we’ve been nominated for an award and I was writing this post anyway I figured why not?

Anyway – the award is essentially a popularity contest and as we’re the only self-published game in it I’d love to stick it to the games that have big teams and publishers (just kidding, I have buddies at those studios). Simply quote tweet this post with the text:

“I vote for SENTRY to win the @gugamesfest Players’ Choice Award at #ggAwards24”

Much appreciated!

[h3]From the Community![/h3]
We’ll finish off this post with some cool stuff from the community.

Steam user Grinnij created their own render of the P9:

We always get a kick out of seeing this sort of thing, so please flag any fan art you see on your travels!

Feedback is incredibly important in improving the game, so please keep it coming! You can reach us on all these places:

Thanks for the support, while we’re keen to resume work on the full campaign co-op, if there’s anything particularly urgent that crops up we’ll update the combat test build and let you know.

Dev Transmission (September 2024)

Hi all, our programmer Adam is continuing to work through the mountain of tasks in order to get the Combat Co-op Test ready for public consumption, which is his primary focus – it’s getting closer!

Originally, we were thinking that this upcoming combat co-op test would be friends/invite only and thus those people could utilise Discord for voice chat, however we felt that it was important to also test open play, and therefore needed to add in-game voice support. This includes various additional voice-related settings to tweak to your preference.

We also found that when designing how you’d logistically connect and play with one another, we had an increasing amount of questions around how this would work in the full campaign. While we had designs for this, the devil is truly in the details and creating the exact UI flow, answering those specifics and solving those edge cases flushes out all sorts of horrible problems that needed resolution. An added benefit to doing this is that there are some shared assets and code between both the combat co-op test and what will be used in the full game.

Our testing has also thrown up some issues that we’d ideally sort too, things like one player sneaking into the other player’s pod at exact moments and getting stuck.

All told, that’s put us a bit behind where we were hoping to be, but important progress nonetheless. We’re just as eager to get this out as you are to play it; we just need to make sure we do it the right way and not rush something that doesn’t meet your expectations.

[h3]Levels: Chasm & Logistics![/h3]
With our sole programmer working on co-op, we’ve got Sean and Alex churning through new levels.

With Logistics and Chasm having had multiple playtests and refinements, both have now had their art pass from Alex.

I’ve personally been having a lot of fun with the Vortex Glove, Vortex Grid and Conveyors in Chasm – there’s lots of opportunities to throw enemies into the abyss:

In Logistics, we’ve made the overhead conveyors MUCH easier to hit so they release their crates directly below them. We also made the non-explosive crates they drop stun any enemies they hit, although the image below shows the explosive variety:

[h3]Levels: Central Processing v2.0![/h3]
We have a reworked Central Processing out with our playtesters. Sean has simplified the routes into the core room and ensured the walls next to the windows were adjusted to allow effective deployable placement when the shutters were closed:

We’re working to close off those long sightlines the enemy had on the core, so they shouldn’t be able to snipe it from as far away as they could previously:

The player spawn area has been completely redesigned. It’s simpler and shorter so you can quickly get back into the action:

All enemy spawns (the old A and C, along with new placements for B and D) are situated in the same cardinal direction, so you're able to better defend on a single front:

That means the old B and D spawns have been removed – we’re thinking the layouts for that side of the original map could be the basis for a future level. Sean talks about some of his workings and thought process here, if you’re interested.

With this rework of Central Processing, we’ll also use this opportunity to ensure the level has an improved framerate, as it was one of our worst performing levels. And speaking of optimisations, Alex has done a pass over the Crossing, so you’ll see improvements to loading times on that level once the Major Update releases.

[h3]Levels: Fuel Exchange v2.0[/h3]
Fuel Exchange has also got a design pass to improve it. Some of these original levels may feel acceptable as they are, but as we saw with Mess Hall having a subsequent pass accounting for player feedback can really improve things (although at the time Mess Hall had more overt issues!)

The primary change is around the old Operations room. Whereas three routes used to converge at this point, now the old A spawn meets up with D and the old B and C routes go through here:

I talk about “old” breach points, because we’ve renamed them so that A to D goes from left-to-right as you enter the level. So that means the new A & B (old A and D) are off to the left, while the new C & D (old B & C) are off to the right. A bit initially confusing for veterans, but the objectives are easier to read now.

There’s some good places in the map for the player to rotate between A/B and C/D, some of these are one-way drops:

The new Fuel Exchange hasn’t gone out to playtesters yet, so we’d expect some changes to come from reviewing their feedback.

As with all our new levels, once we’ve had the chance to incorporate playtest feedback we’ll pass it over to Alex so she can finish the art.

[h3]From the Community![/h3]
As is usual, we’ll finish off the Dev Transmission with some cool stuff from the community.

Discord user TheCartoon1st has drawn one of our enemies emerging victorious from a battle with a turret:

We love seeing this sort of thing, so if you spot anything cool on your travels please send it our way.

Speaking of community, thank-you to those that supported any of the games in the recent Special Effect sale we participated in. All of the games on this event page contribute toward the charity, so hopefully you picked up some good games for less, along with helping a good cause at the same time :)

We track all of your feedback in a big list, so keep it coming! If we don’t respond to every single post/review, be assured we read them all. You can reach us on all these places:

Thanks for the support, as soon as the co-op combat test is up I’ll be posting about it!