SENTRY News

SENTRY releases into Early Access on the 25th March!

All civilians are to be enlisted into the SENTRY Defense Program on the 25th March.

Call for Playtesters!

Hi everyone, as we rapidly approach release we're holding weekly playtest sessions with our community.

if you're interested in helping us playtest the campaign for SENTRY then you should head to our Discord and check out the Announcements channel for more details.

The SENTRY Defense Program thanks you for your service.

Dev Transmission (January 2024)

Hi everyone, it’s been a very productive month – no time for suffering the January blues! Here’s what we’ve been up to:

[h3]The Campaign![/h3]
The big focus this month has been continued work on our campaign and how the three layers of the game (Navigator, Overview and the battles) link together. Some highlights include:

Level health now persists across a run, so if you let enemies slip through, the next time that level is attacked means fewer enemies need to escape
If a level has been lost, enemies get a free move past it in the Overview. This means they can approach your core much quicker and impacts your choices about where to defend.
You can repair levels, meaning enemies need to take those levels over again to progress – but this comes at a high resource cost that could be spent on upgrades
Further improved messaging, such as a picture-in-picture display of chasing vessels/missiles while you’re in the Overview
Derelicts used to give you a random blueprint, you now get to choose from three types including additional resources if you’d prefer to focus on upgrades rather than new weapons/deployables/abilities
Victory and Defeat screens that communicate what you’re carrying through to your next run – or in some cases, what you’ve lost
When you travel through a sector gate, you can now choose to either increase your weapon/deployable slots, or bank any new blueprints you’ve acquired

[h3]New After Action Report![/h3]
The After Action report is your end of mission debrief screen. We reworked this from the demo to be better suited to the campaign and freeplay modes:

You’re now awarded a S, A, B, C or D grade based on your level performance, as well as displaying information that carries across to the campaign, such as rewards and level health.

[h3]Polish![/h3]
As we get closer to release, we’re spending more time polishing the build. This is where a lot of the feedback from the demo has been incredibly useful to help us prioritise. A handful of tasks we’ve completed recently are:

Sprint jumping now has the correct momentum :)
More camera settings to help with motion sickness
A swathe of additional actions can now have their key bindings changed
Doors can now only be opened/closed during the prep phase, but are free to use. Combined with increased health they’re more useful as a delaying tactic
Scrap that falls out of level is now auto-collected, so you won’t lose anything if some scrap tumbles into a pit!
Enemies can now attack through the breach forcefields, reducing how overpowered it was to camp the breach points

There’s tons more we’ve done, and an even bigger list for us to work through – but the above points came up a fair few times as feedback so it’s good to get those improvements in.

[h3]Playtesting![/h3]
We’re back into a serious playtesting phase, so if you fancy getting a sneak preview of the campaign, sign up to our Discord.

We’ve got this weekend’s playtesters sorted, but the plan is to do more playtests every 1-2 weeks and so we’ll be taking in more valiant volunteers during that time.

We love it when we hear from you! We try and respond to every post – but if we don’t please be assured we always read them and take note of feedback and comments! You can reach us on these platforms:

Our primary focus from here till release is improving what’s already in the game, which means February’s Dev Transmission might not necessarily be full of big new features – but it does make the game a much tighter and fun experience.

That said, we are planning on squeezing in at least one more enemy, but we’ll see…

Oh – and we’ll leave the demo up for a while longer. Even though it’s not been updated since early October we’re still getting hundreds of downloads every week so it makes sense for people just discovering SENTRY to get their taster before we release.

Thanks for the support!

Dev Transmission (December 2023)

Hi everyone, Happy New Year! Although confusingly this post is about the work we did in December because I didn’t have time to write it up before Christmas hit… Anyway, here are the headline areas we worked on:

[h3]New Deployables![/h3]
We’ve added some new deployables that provide additional gameplay variety and act as counters to certain enemy types.

[h3]New Levels![/h3]
We’ve been putting two new levels through their paces with our playtesters on Discord – The Pit and Mainframe.

In the past we’ve revisited old levels and reworked/improved those, so it’s been good to create two completely new levels with all of the lessons learned from watching people play.

[h3]Overview & Campaign![/h3]
With a lot of time in previous months spent improving the Navigator portion of the campaign, we’ve turned our attention to the Ship Overview (the part where enemies move around your vessel). What we’ve found is that a lot of messaging and feedback is required regarding how the two parts blend together, which we’ll continue to focus on in January.

[h3]New Enemy Weapons![/h3]
Our standard soldier enemy is one that has a lot of versatility in combat, so we wanted to expand this by creating additional weapons that they can carry.

The image in the top-right is their existing weapon; a three-burst mid-range rifle you should be familiar with.

In addition to that weapon, they can now be equipped with a pistol, a shotgun-equivalent or a longer range rifle and their behaviours are adjusted to suit the weapon they carry (i.e. if it’s shorter-range they’ll look to close the distance more).

This also allows us to balance enemy forces to a greater degree – such as weighting more pistol-based enemies at the start, and mix up additional weapons as the wave difficulty increases.

In January we’ll look to improve this feature by giving them custom animations and visual effects to help differentiate them in combat, which will help you prioritise who you should target first!

We’ve got thoughts on a couple of our other bipedal weapon carrying enemies that could be prime candidates for this kind of treatment, but we’ll cover that in a future post.

We love it when you speak to us! We try to respond to every post – but if we don’t please be assured we always read them and take note of feedback and comments! You can reach us on these platforms:

We’ve got so many ideas for extra deployables, weapons, enemies etc. but as we approach release we’re gradually shifting into polishing and improving what is already in-game. This is so that we can maintain a consistently high quality – after all, Early Access major updates are a perfect time to introduce more cool content :)

Thanks for the support and see you next time…

Season's Greetings!

2023 is nearly finished and what a year it's been! The two highlights had to be taking the game on tour to various events across the US and UK in the spring, plus the public demo for the October Next Fest.

Seeing people play the game in person, watching videos/streams and reading all your posts has been an absolute pleasure and we're so happy with the reception SENTRY has been getting. Valve ranking us 24th out of 2336 games in the Next Fest was very humbling (you can read the details on how Next Fest went here).

As well as working through your feedback, we've lately been spending a lot of time on the navigator, overview and upgrade system that forms part of the campaign and it's been lovely seeing everything slot together. We're excited for you to get your hands on this when SENTRY releases into Early Access in the first part of 2024!

All of this success wouldn't be possible without your support, so to every one of you who plays the demo, provides feedback, wishlists the game, shares/likes our social posts or chats on Discord - THANK YOU!

However you celebrate, everyone at Fireblade Software (me, Adam, Alex, Sean, Barry & Mark) wish you
a happy and fantastic end to 2023!