SENTRY News

Hi everyone,

Major Update 1: Starfarer is out now! This post collates all the changes we’ve made. Firstly, a massive thank-you to everyone that tested the beta branch and provided feedback across Steam and Discord – we’ve been stomping on the bugs as they’ve been coming in and it was great to have your validation and extra testing muscle, particularly as the game has now significantly expanded.



Steam should auto-update to the new version, which will have 0.6.24473 or later in the bottom-right of the main menu. Your profile saves (i.e. equipment and slots) will carry over. If you’re in the middle of a run though, that won’t carry over. If the game detects you’re trying to load an older save, it’ll give a reminder message in case you want to finish the run on that old version.

The original version is available as a beta branch called “0.5.23844 - Launch Version”. Please bear in mind that if you unlock new ships and campaigns in the latest version, go back to the original and play that profile, and then come back to the new version again, those ship and campaign unlocks will be lost on that profile. I don’t expect many would choose to do that, but I thought I’d mention it just in case.

If you’d like to back up your profile saves for whatever reason, you can find your save folder here: C:\Users\\AppData\LocalLow\Fireblade Software\SENTRY\Saves\Steam

Housekeeping done, so on with the cool new stuff :)

[h3]New Campaigns and Vessels (aka the Launch Screen)![/h3]
This is most likely the biggest change to the game and as mentioned in previous Dev Transmissions is the foundation of the campaign going forward. Two of the most frequent issues people noted with the first Early Access release was the volume of content and the difficulty; this improves both.

You may remember we posted up some details on this screen before, which can be found here:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1252680/view/6232499459766436169

In short, when you launch a campaign you’ll be taken to this menu where you have a choice of vessels and campaigns:


Vessels are unlocked by satisfying certain requirements and provide modifiers on your run. This provides variety and if you’re struggling with the difficulty allows you to work towards ships that help you in specific ways. Running out of crew? Choose the Medical ship. Suffering from a lack of Materials? Choose the Mining vessel etc. The current four are just the start, in future updates we’ll add more vessels.

Campaigns provide different difficulties. In this update there are two, but more will be added in subsequent Major Updates. Starfarer is approximately the same difficulty as the original campaign, but across three sectors. Initiate is two sectors long, doesn’t have homing missiles and is easier than Starfarer. Note that I said easier, not easy :) SENTRY is meant to be challenging, evoking emotions of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat and limping over the finish line. But it shouldn’t be impossible for people who are struggling and Initiate is a campaign more suited to those people who can spend time learning to play and banking a selection of equipment before stepping up to harder campaigns.

Oh, and on that note – equipment is now split into two tiers: Common and Uncommon. On Initiate you can only acquire Common equipment, so if you want the bigger toys you’ll need to venture into Starfarer.

Difficulty has been an interesting problem on SENTRY. Some people found the game too easy, some too hard while others just right. One issue with a single campaign – and why we didn’t just rush out balancing tweaks – is that we couldn’t balance toward one side without alienating the opposite end of the scale. Having multiple campaigns allows us to tackle this in the right way. The trouble with a dynamic campaign is that we’re not only having to consider players varying skill levels, but what the game throws at you, when and where (both in terms of level location and where you may be on upgrade paths) – all can provide varying results. It’s partially why I described Starfarer as “approximately” the same as the original campaign difficulty – at points it may be easier, at other times harder depending on all those various factors and your personal experience. All these variables mean that’s why your constructive feedback is essential in helping us adjust these difficulties and create new ones along our Roadmap.

[h3]Other Difficulty-Related Changes![/h3]
We’ve made a lot of other changes that would impact difficulty, so I’ve collated them here.

Previously, breach locations would be random and we only had control over the number of breaches. This randomness could provide some very spiky random difficulty, so we’ve created a system that gives our designer Sean greater control. So in Initiate for example, the spawn locations won’t stretch your defense in the same way Starfarer would, and we can provide broader escalation.

The spawning system has also changed to accommodate the new difficulty tiers. Enemies are divided into Boarding Parties (i.e. the force that moves around your ship), which are comprised of waves, with each wave comprised of multiple squads. There’s been a lot of work at the Squads level to ensure that we have greater control over the difficulty but can also ensure enemies are introduced at the right points, because some of those enemy archetypes provide a spike in challenge, especially in combinations. Taking Initiate as an example, there’ll be more “Grunt” level enemies (i.e. the grey ones) and less Veterans/Elites (blue/red variants), along with lesser occurrences of the special enemy archetypes versus Starfarer. There’s lots more variety and granularity we can add in future here too.

The tutorial sector has been shortened and made easier. This is so we can get people into the proper game loop faster and for a tutorial, it was previously too hard and not a welcoming experience. You only play this once on a new profile, so this point is more for new players than existing ones – but an important change nonetheless.

[h3]New Enemies![/h3]

Enemy reinforcements have arrived! The Flamejack and Bilejack inflict burn and poison damage on the player. A charging enemy adds chaos to combat as it bashes into you, enemies and props alike. Our heavier bipedal enemy now has additional tier variants and some come with a shield and flak pistol, requiring a step-change in your approach.

Last but not least, you’ll see our grub enemies now come in a different colour. I’ve no doubt the green ones will make a return in future with some different behaviour.

[h3]New Equipment![/h3]
The SENTRY Defense Program isn’t blind to your plight and has made additional equipment available.

The Peacekeeper and Flame Shot are three-slot weapons, giving some much-needed variety to sit alongside the SMG tier:


Two old friends from the demo have returned; the Exploding Barrel and Landmine:


An Extractor deployable is useful against flying enemies and is joined by the Stun Grenade to complete the new roster:


I won’t go into detail here, half the fun is getting to try them yourself :)

[h3]Supply Beacons and Duplicate Blueprints[/h3]
In the Navigator, derelicts have been replaced with Supply Beacons that denote their level (Common or Uncommon).

Derelicts may make a return in some other form later in Early Access.

Also, when receiving a blueprint that you already have, it’ll be at a random upgrade level.

[h3]New Level and level updates![/h3]
There is a new sub system on the Roughneck, which is called The Crossing. The main area is a large room with plenty of places to throw enemies into the abyss.


You’ll also notice that the levels on the Ship Overview are now randomised (except if you’re playing the Tutorial sector) which provides greater variety on subsequent escapes.

While we’ve done lots of tweaks to existing levels like adding more places for deployables and other fixes, Mess Hall has had an overhaul. It’s a similar layout, but the exit has swapped places with one of the other spawn locations, meaning that the level is no longer all about that single corridor. There are still spawns that utilise that corridor so there’s plentiful venting opportunities.

About half the comments on Mess Hall were negative, the rest positive. But the positive comments frequently alluded to using that level as a crutch to handle difficulty – which is not ideal. This, combined with a more balanced overall game means that Mess Hall is actually fun now.

[h3]And other stuff![/h3]
There’s a whole heap of miscellaneous bug fixes, polish and improvements that we’ve done too. In no particular order:

• Poison and Burn status effects impact the player
  
• Barrels on the back of the Tank enemy now show damage and we've improved the hit impacts on this enemy in general
  
• Explosions now don’t destroy barrels, but set them on fire
  
• Explosions will tend to throw enemies further than before
  
• Rivet Grid now restocks in preparation phases
  
• Deployables reload bars are now desaturated until they are fully recharged, at which point the bars colour is shown making it easier to identify between states
  
• Increased speed of enemy boarding parties moving in the Overview
  
• Optimisations on visual effects, enemies and levels – there’s still lots more work to do on this throughout Early Access, we are by no means done – the guidelines on this performance post are still accurate
  
• Forcefields change colour when all enemies have left the forcefield area
  
• Sound now plays to denote the final wave banner
  
• Player and enemy now play burning audio if affected by the burn status
  
• Suit VO for when there is only one SENTRY left and they arrive in a level
  
• Removed delays on loudspeaker audio so the warnings are more prompt
  
• Enemy grenades now have a different sound effect when exploding
  
• After Action Report, Equipment, Navigator and Overview menus are functional with gamepad (note these are functional, they are not polished or anything that we deem to be “full controller support” - that is in the pipeline)
  
• Balancing tweaks to most equipment (DMR, Boltgun, Railgun, all pistols, AR44 and its secondary to name but a few)
  
• Various balancing tweaks to Deployables and Gear
  
• Various enemy balancing tweaks
  
• Fixed an issue with soldier enemies getting stuck in Central Processing because they couldn’t find an attacking point on a damaged Core
  
• Made some tutorial messaging clearer
  
• Enemies no longer get stuck on the lip round the edge of The Pit
  
• Fixed pulse pad, conveyor and vortex grid not starting fully charged when placed during a preparation phase
  
• Fixed some holes where you could see out of the level in various places
  
• Removed HUD opacity setting from the game as it was buggy and there are already options to turn the HUD on or off
  
• Fixed shutters in Mainframe and Fuel Exchange so you can now build on them
  
• Soldier enemies no longer throw grenades if the player is too far above them
  
• Removed floating player health bar that could appear in certain situations
  
• And finally, fixed the vending machine stock error so the Strawberry and Mint flavours are no longer mismatched:
  

Actually, maybe that last one was the most important update of all…


We hope you like the latest updates for Major Update 1. We’re waiting on translations, so will patch those in as soon as we have them all. We’ll also be keeping an eye on our various channels to pick up any feedback or thoughts on the latest additions and will fix anything important that crops up, so please continue telling us your thoughts.

Remember this is just the first Major Update, there’s more to come and we have a huge list of all your feedback that we’re working through alongside the Roadmap.

Once you’ve checked out the latest changes, don’t forget to leave a Steam review!

Aside from any patches that require our attention, work will commence on Major Update 2: which will be focused around co-op.

Thanks for the support!

The Fireblade Crew

Hi everyone,

You can now test Major Update 1 ahead of its official release!

To gain access, you’ll need to switch to a beta branch – here’s how to do that:

• Find SENTRY in your Steam library and right-click on it, selecting “Properties”
  
• In the menu that pops up, choose “Betas”
  
• There is a “Beta Participation” drop-down list, select “Beta Branch”
  
• 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.

Because of the new campaign setup, once you test the Beta Branch please avoid going back to the old version, as when you return to the new one you’ll lose any ship or campaign unlocks in the latest version.

It’s generally good practice to back up your profile saves for situations like these just in case :)
You can find your save folder here: C:\Users\\AppData\LocalLow\Fireblade Software\SENTRY\Saves\Steam

With those logistical details out the way, dive in and have fun!

We’d love to hear any feedback, particularly on the new additions. In order to not mix up beta branch feedback with the main game, we’ve created a new area on the Steam forums to post your beta branch comments: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1252680/discussions/0/


Thanks for your continued support! Once the new build has been put through its paces we’ll officially release it, along with a detailed list of what has changed.

Hi everyone,

If all goes to plan then at the end of this week/early next week we should make a preview version of Major Update 1 available on a beta branch. Your testing data and feedback will help us make some final fixes and tweaks ahead of the official release.

One of the biggest differences in the coming update is when you commence your escapes you’ll now be taken to a new menu with several options to choose, and I thought you might find it interesting to know how this is going to work, so this post will focus on this new Launch screen:


As mentioned in our previous Dev Transmissions we see this as providing a strong foundation for us to plug in lots more content in the future. Anyway, you’ve probably noticed a few things in the image so I’ll dive in…

[h3]Ship Choice[/h3]
When you begin your escape you’ll choose which ship class you wish to launch with. These provide modifiers so you have greater flexibility in how you wish to play. You may want to lean into a particular playstyle, or feel like you need assistance in certain areas – there’s a vessel that should satisfy your needs.

The first batch of ships will be more straightforward variants, but as we expand the options throughout Early Access we’ll have increasingly eclectic choices. As we expand the roster of levels, some may be locked to certain ship types.

You’ll acquire new vessels upon achieving objectives. The first ships will be unlocked through successful escapes but we’re looking forward to eventually providing more varied requirements, secret ships and tying in achievements.

[h3]Campaign Selection[/h3]
Campaigns inform the difficulty, the tier of equipment you can discover and the length of an escape run amongst other things. Future campaigns will expand this even further, with some endgame campaigns leaning more heavily into rogue elements.

There’s a broad range of player requirements when it comes to the difficulty in SENTRY, from those who struggle to those that find the game too easy (and everything in between) – so this system is the first step towards catering to those varied requirements.

Major Update 1 launches with a choice of two campaigns. The first is called “Initiate” and is a good place for players to spend time building up their experience. There’ll be hunter ships but no missiles. With all weapons, deployables and gear now divided into tiers, you’ll be unlocking the lower tiers of equipment which will help with a sense of progress and is useful for when you decide to take that step up to harder and longer campaigns.

New profiles will need to complete the tutorial sector, but this will be condensed and slightly easier – we want to get players into the ‘meat’ of the game sooner, and we understand that it could be dispiriting for those who couldn’t get through it.

The second campaign is called “Starfarer” and takes place over three sectors. If you want the higher tiers of equipment you’ll need to tackle this campaign.

Future Major Updates will add increasingly harder campaigns.

[h3]Difficulty Levers[/h3]
With the first version of SENTRY only having one campaign, it meant we couldn’t balance the game toward one end of the difficulty scale without negatively impacting the opposite end, so having a choice of campaigns allows us to address this properly.

There are a lot of different approaches we take to adjust difficulty. Some of these ‘difficulty levers’ we’re pulling are:

• Enemy archetypes – some of the more exotic enemies increase combat difficulty. The prevalence and their appearance timing will be influenced based on campaign choice.
  
• Enemy tier levels – a lot of enemies have Grunt (grey), Veteran (blue) and Elite (red) versions, so for example you’ll notice Initiate has more occurrences of Grunts than higher difficulties
  
• Enemy weapons – some enemies carry different weapons. Looking at our soldier enemy, they can be equipped with a pistol, shotgun, burst rifle or assault rifle weapons. Using the Initiate campaign as an example, the prevalence of those stronger weapons would be rarer compared to other difficulties
  
• Volume of enemies – an obvious one, but we can throw more or less across different campaigns (being mindful of performance of course!)
  
• Door breaches – Dealing with multiple breaches is harder than a single breach. The Initiate campaign will build up slower to multiple breaches at a time, whereas higher difficulties will hit you harder, sooner.
  

There’s lots more or course, but they all give us ways to provide necessary variance whilst ensuring fun regardless of campaign choice.

This has massively expanded the amount of work on our single designer Sean and will continue to do so as we add more campaigns, so we had to change the way we implement these. We’ve managed to create a new pipeline that retains the level of handcrafted setup whilst being more efficient to balance across the game.



Hopefully you’ve enjoyed seeing what’s incoming and learning about the reasons behind our approach. We’d really like every escape in SENTRY to feel like a desperate flight, where you limp across the finish line and get a sense of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. We know our first release didn’t nail that for all players enough of the time, so hopefully this new system will improve that, and allow us to continue to improve it in future.

I’ll put up an announcement when the beta branch is available. There are a lot of changes so your feedback will help us improve it for when the official release happens shortly after. Once you get your hands on it, let us know your thoughts!

Hi everyone, welcome to the latest Dev Transmission – a monthly roundup of what we’ve been working on.

Adam, Alex and Sean are beavering away on Major Update 1, which is estimated to release at the end of June. There’ll be a preview version posted up on a beta branch in advance for those that want to help test it, we’ll post an announcement when that’s ready.

Anyway, here’s what we’ve been up to in May:

[h3]Ship Launch Screen and Campaign Length/Difficulty![/h3]
As mentioned last month, this is an important new system for the game that both caters to varying difficulties and provides greater run variety. Because of this, it’s a multi-discipline effort to get the basic feature working, the associated UI to make your choices at the start of an escape and a hell of a lot of balancing to go with it.

On this menu you’ll be choosing which ship you’ll launch with and they provide different modifiers and levels. You’ll also pick which campaign route (aka difficulty) you’ll travel along which influences the amount of sectors you need to escape through, what sort of equipment you can gain along the way (i.e. to get the highest tiers you need to play the harder modes) and other difficulty modifiers.

More vessels and difficulties are unlocked as you play and as we continue throughout Early Access we can expand this with extra ships, campaigns and levels.

[h3]New Enemies![/h3]
Last month we showed some of the new variants for one of our larger bipedal enemies. Keen-eyed readers may have spotted the cover image showing one of them carrying a large metallic shield. Here’s some concept art of that plus the new ranged weapon they carry:


We’ve also finished a new enemy archetype we’ve not previously talked about this month too, and we’re looking forward to watching you battle it soon :)

The Collective have been monitoring SDP comms traffic and know how much you detest the flying enemies, so are preparing two additional ones to enter the fray:


(Original flyer included at the bottom for reference)

[h3]New Equipment![/h3]
To counter this, the SENTRY Defense Program has been processing combat data and has prepared a new deployable to deal with those pesky flyers:


It’ll only be able to suck up so many until it jams and needs to purge before it restarts, although this can be improved with upgrades.

Last month we showed a new weapon called the Riot Gun, and we have concept art for another 3-slot weapon to show you that we’ve been working on this month:


[h3]Other stuff![/h3]
We’ve been chipping away at a whole bunch of miscellaneous tasks from both our own lists and those generated by the community, ranging from some optimisations around visual effects, adding support for status effects to impact the player, polishing the latest new level based on Discord playtest feedback and general bug-fixing, polish and balancing.

[h3]From the Community![/h3]
In our previous monthly update I finished off with some cool content from the community.

Discord user Jajomba is at it again, with some creative use of the Vortex Grid to create a shortcut in Mess Hall (repurposed into a YouTube Short with his permission): https://youtube.com/shorts/AV3wHaWXvKc?si=_9aMlX7DmwxA43Az


And finally some fan art from Discord user ocddragon. They affectionately refer to these enemies as “Glubbies” and drew one hitching a ride on its larger cousin:


Got some fan art or cool gameplay captures? We love seeing them, so send them to me on Discord or our socials!


We’ve got a big list of your feedback we’re keeping track of and using to improve the game, so keep telling us your thoughts! Even if we don’t respond to every single one, be assured we read them all. You can reach us on all these places:

• Steam forums
• YouTube
• Twitter
• Facebook
• TikTok
• Instagram
• Discord
• Newsletter signup

We’re looking forward to you getting your hands on these latest changes when Major Update 1 launches at the end of June (or sooner if you play the beta branch version) – and we’ve already got a huge list of other cool stuff we want to add in future updates too, for more on that check out the Roadmap here:

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1252680/view/5921742839579227575

Thanks for all the support and if you haven’t done so already, please leave a Steam review!

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:

• Steam forums
• YouTube
• Twitter
• Facebook
• TikTok
• Instagram
• Discord
• Newsletter signup

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!