Suit for Hire News

Hello everyone!

We're pleased to announce that the Miami Debut update has finally been released and is available on the official version of the game.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We've done extensive testing with the community these past few months so everything should be smooth sailing, if you experience any issues though, please let us know!

Additionally, to celebrate this update, we're also participating in the SHMUP-Fest by doing a 40% discount now until October 2nd!

If you're new to the game or haven't kept up with our past few devlogs, this post will summarize most of what we've added/changed in the game. There were a lot of bugs fixed so we sadly can't cover that but we'll make sure to have our eyes peeled for any bugs reported in the coming weeks.


The Miami Debut is only the beginning of the new Miami Series, containing chapters that will challenge you in new and fresh ways. This update currently contains 3 chapters of the 7 that we plan on releasing, and there may be more if we find the time/resources to do so.



The Miami Series is unlocked after completing the Toronno Series (originally named Campaign), get in there and unlock those new primary weapons!


Alongside new levels comes new weaponry, the loadout menu now holds the ability to customize your primary weapon, both of which can be unlocked by completing chapters throughout the game- the Revolver and Silenced Pistol add new and interesting ways to play the game.



On top of the new primary weapon system, we also added 2 new secondary weapons that you'll find throughout the game and its new chapters.



Get in there and try them out, we have more guns/weapons planned for the upcoming months and we're always listening for feedback to improve the current set of weapons.


We've added some fun new mechanics and improvements that should add some more spice to your melee combat and gun handling.

Grappling is a new move that you can use (hotkey can be changed in the Settings menu), grapple enemies and use them as a body-shield or throw them at other enemies/the environment- this was a tough mechanic to add so definitely let us know if you're encountering any problems with it!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Countering has also been slightly adjusted to use the grapple key instead of the Interact key, we have BIG plans for the counter system that we think you'll enjoy quite a bit- we can't make promises when that update will happen though as big changes will be made to our AI first.

Aiming has been improved on PC, if you're physically aiming at an enemy with your cursor at a different height, you should be guaranteed to auto-aim at that enemy. This should make hitting enemies on PC a lot better, let us know how it feels.

Kicking and opening doors is a bit more realistic (and dramatic, depending on which option you go with), should add a fun and interesting way to enter rooms!

More can be found in the video below:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

... and much more. The game has had many adjustments all throughout, including some improvements in older chapters. We're striving to improve not only new content but old content as well so everyone's experience is a great one. We hope that this new update is fun for everyone and marks a new chapter for the game, we're looking forward to providing more consistent and frequent updates in the months to come with new features, chapters, and more.

We haven't been able to fix a few issues just yet though and we're working away on them or keeping them for a future patch, below are some known issues that we'll be looking into resolving.

[h2]KNOWN ISSUES[/h2]

• In the Cathedral/Art Exhibit, it may be a bit difficult for the player to figure out what to do/where to go, we'll be adding some sort of dialogue system or something of the sort to lead the player
  
• Some colors are a bit difficult to see for some players, such as enemies through walls- we'll add some customization for this since it can pose as an accessibility issue
  
• Enemies crouching/staggered are sometimes difficult to hit
  
• Weird issue if the player has multiple monitors and aims at the edge of their screen, the player's aim would freak out like the window lost focus
  
• Audio not resetting in Toronno, Chapter 2
  
• Enemies getting stuck in some spots due to losing navigation (like on the boats in Shipyard)
  
• When a player is executing an enemy, other enemies can kill/hit the executed enemy
  
• Save Phones don't offer much for the game, we'll be removing these in a future patch
  

Thank you for all of the support these past few months, and a big thank you to everyone who submitted feedback, bug reports, and suggestions leading up to this update. Please send us more so we can make future patches/updates great!

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Discuss the game with us and the community on Discord and Twitter. If you want to see the game developed live, catch Crimson on Twitch.

Report any bugs or feedback on our Community Hub.

Hey everyone,

We're finally nearing the beginning of the Miami series, we're going to keep this sweet and short since we'd like to get any feedback you have before we release the new chapters and mechanics on the official version of the game.

We'll go through some more things we added in hopes to improve your experience and known issues that we'll be resolving ASAP to improve QOL and overall direction when playing the new chapters.


The Art Exhibit is the third and final chapter we're adding to the beta branch that'll kick off the Miami Debut, keep in mind that we'll be releasing more chapters throughout the months to come in this Miami expansion. On that note, it's on the beta branch and we're looking for any feedback you have!


If you're experiencing any bugs in the level, performance issues, and overall gameplay struggles, please let us know on any of our socials found at the bottom of this post.


Auto aiming at enemies placed at different heights is a tough problem to solve for an isometric top-down game, we technically auto-aim based on the current height that the player is at so at certain angles it gets really challenging to understand what the player is trying to aim at- there's a lot of technical details that we could maybe go into in the future if the community is interested.

Cursor aimed at the enemy above But in reality our system assumes you're aiming at a different spot

Nonetheless, we added an additional measure in a new patch released today to attempt to fix any aim issues that the player may be having on Mouse & Keyboard- no matter what, if your cursor is nearby/on an enemy at a higher/lower elevation than your character, the character should auto-aim at them even with any weird camera perspective issues, thus fixing the above problem.

Please let us know if you have any trouble with this and finding yourself wrangling with aim in this new beta branch update.

We'll be fixing more issues within the next few days as we sprint towards the finish line, we'd appreciate any support/feedback from all of you if you ever have the time!

We haven't been able to fix a few issues just yet though and we're working away on them or keeping them for a future patch, below are some known issues that we'll be looking into resolving.

[h2]KNOWN ISSUES[/h2]

• In the Cathedral/Art Exhibit, it may be a bit difficult for the player to figure out what to do/where to go, we'll be adding some sort of dialogue system or something of the sort to lead the player
  
• Some colors are a bit difficult to see for some players, such as enemies through walls- we'll add some customization for this since it can pose as an accessibility issue
  
• Bug with grappling an enemy and kicking them causes them to attack the player during grapple
  
• Enemies crouching/staggered are sometimes difficult to hit
  
• Weird issue if the player has multiple monitors and aims at the edge of their screen, the player's aim would freak out like the window lost focus
  
• A bug with using the Continue button doesn't stop/mute the main menu music
  
• Audio not resetting in Chapter 2
  
• Enemies getting stuck in some spots due to losing navigation (like on the boats in Shipyard)
  
• When a player is executing an enemy, other enemies can kill/hit the executed enemy
  
• Save Phones don't offer much for the game, we'll be removing these in a future patch
  

Thanks for reading and we hope you're enjoying the new additions/changes to Suit for Hire, thanks for all the support and patience as we finally get things rolling out!

See you in the next devlog, which should hopefully be when the Miami Debut update begins.

[hr][/hr]
Discuss the game with us and the community on Discord and Twitter. If you want to see the game developed live, catch Crimson on Twitch.

Report any bugs or feedback on our Community Hub.

Hey everyone,

Welcome to another Devlog for Suit for Hire, in this devlog we'll catch you up to date on all of the latest things we've done since February.

Before getting started though, I want to express my understanding for anybody who is upset or confused about the lack of updates in the past year or so. Last year I had the idea of doing one big update with new levels and mechanics and that quickly turned into a bad idea as it was quite a bit for the two of us (one of us on the team being just a music artist), that and having other jobs definitely made it take a lot longer than we anticipated to get an update released (hence the test branch, to give an early look at new features).

This definitely wasn't our best decision and it slowed down updates, once we release the Miami Debut update, we'll be returning to a bi-weekly update flow as long as our other jobs don't cut in too much. That should improve things for ourselves and the community, we apologize for the long wait on new content and again, we understand any frustrations that our early access players have in regards to this.

That being said, let's cover what we've done in the past few months!


If you haven't checked out the Beta Branch, we recently pushed the Cathedral and it's available for play! We're looking for any bug reports, feedback on gameplay, etc. that you may have. We're doing our best to make the new chapters a fun and challenging experience for everyone.



Let us know what you think on the Beta Branch thread!


The Primary Weapons that we showed off in the past few devlogs are now unlockable through completing specific chapters in the game, as time goes on we'll be adding more primary weapons and adding more challenges throughout chapters that unlock them.




We're making huge progress on the third chapter for the Miami Debut update, the Art Exhibit. We're focused on finalizing the final fight area and from there we'll be preparing the level to be released on the Test Branch, at that point onward we'll be heavily looking for feedback and bug squashing to make the Miami Debut have a great start.

Here's a sneak peek at the chapter so far:




New chapters means new toys to play around with, our goal is to keep adding more secondary weapons that spice up the gameplay and make it more enjoyable for Suits whenever a new chapter is released throughout the Miami Series:



We have a ton more going on behind the scenes, such as improvements to the Shipyard, gameplay, and more. We're hoping to gather more feedback from the community to make sure we're going in the right direction.

For now, thanks a lot for taking the time to read today's devlog, the next one should be when we release the Art Exhibit chapter to the Test Branch and work towards finally releasing this new update into the official version of the game!

Take it easy and see you in the next one.

[hr][/hr]
Discuss the game with us and the community on Discord and Twitter. If you want to see the game developed live, catch Crimson on Twitch.

Report any bugs or feedback on our Community Hub.

Hey everyone,

The last Devlog we posted was back in Nov 2022 so it was only a matter of time that we had to put out a new devlog to update you on what we've been working on.


We finally pushed the Shipyard to the Beta Branch and we're looking for any feedback or bug reports that you may have!

We've already received a ton of feedback on things that we plan on improving, but we're always looking for more to make sure we're making changes that will improve the game as a whole and prepares the Miami series for release.

Check out the video below to see what you can expect!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Let us know what you think on the Beta Branch thread!


If you've played the newest version of the Test Branch, you may notice that the Cathedral is there, unfortunately it doesn't work just yet but we're definitely getting close to complete on it!

The Cathedral is the 2nd chapter of the Miami Series, tons of close-combat moments and an elite fight at the end is in store for all Suits.

We've been working on a C4 system for the underground segment and much more, it's starting to shape up, take a look below:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


As we've been discussing in the past few Devlogs, we've also been working on new main weapons that you can choose from before beginning a chapter, the UI needed an upgrade for this so that's what we went ahead and did:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We do have more primary weapons planned but we're relatively happy with how you select them from a weapon rack, let us know what you think!


We're not done there, we've made a lot of other adjustments and improvements including but not limited to:

• Updated shaders on vehicles and models throughout the game
  
• Weapon throwing now improved and does not rely on physics (should register hits more consistently)
  
• Doors improved, have to interact to open them so kicking feels better (auto-open door option is in the settings)
  
• Weapon looting animation
  
• Diving animations for 2-handed weapons
  

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Thanks for taking the time to read this devlog, as per usual we're always on Discord and the Community Hub reading your feedback, suggestions and bug reports.

Thanks for your support, see you in the next one!

Hey everyone, hope you've been doing well!

I'm gonna get straight into the devlog as there's some important info to unravel and some explanations for why we're choosing to do things in that way.


As you all know, we've been working hard on getting the Miami series done. In the last devlog we pointed out we're putting more effort into the level design in an effort to make each chapter feel unique from one another, due to this change it does increase development time and we've already spent a LONG time trying to get this new update done (almost 7-8 months of no updates to the official branch, minus the Test/Beta branch).

Not having an update out for almost a year honestly makes me as a developer feel extremely guilty as I always strived to have consistent updates (we started out doing weekly updates with new mechanics almost each time), due to this guilt it definitely got in the way of me as a lead developer to function properly and get things done in a respectable time-frame. As a way of lifting up that guilt and hopefully getting into a more productive groove, we'll be shifting into a new release schedule for the Miami series.

The Miami series will Debut with 3 of the first chapters, all of the mechanics we've been working on, including a lot of changes and upgrades to animations and existing systems. We're kind of starting a "Season" of sorts (I guess, I wouldn't want to consider it as like, a game-as-a-service structure but more of our own thing).

━━━━━━━━━━━━

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
The video above shows a little sneakpeek of what we've been improving ranging from our character's suit cloth physics, recoil animations, and improving trickposing. Lots more to come!

━━━━━━━━━━━━

So I suppose we're introducing the Miami Series as a season of updates, once the debut begins, we'll work hard on resolving any bugs and issues you have. Before pushing the Miami debut to the official branch though, we'll have a important test session for 2 days on the Test/Beta branch to gather any important bug reports and issues that players are having so the official branch is smoother.

We'd appreciate anyone who's willing to test and break the sh** out of the game to try it out and provide feedback either through our Discord or the Community Hub, we want to make sure this big update runs smoothly (the Test branch isn't updated just yet).

After the debut of the Miami series, we'll be working hard on the additional chapters and releasing them at specific periods, we'll be aiming at semi-weekly but we can't promise that just yet. The goal for the Miami series is to of course have 7 chapters including some fun replayable ones like a Survival mode.

These updates may also come with new weapons, enemies, and more! So there's a plethora of things that you can look forward to as we do these new update sprints.

I'd like to personally apologize for not having this update done way earlier, like I stated earlier, it definitely has been eating at me the fact this update hasn't been released yet and I understand anybody's frustrations with the lack of content, etc. I'm hoping with this adjustment we'll be able to release things at a steadier pace again.

That means we're hoping to release the Miami series very soon (not like a developer soonTM, but like an actual soon)!

We'll have more details in a future announcement post as we begin the urgent testing for the update.

Let us know what you think, we hope you have a fantastic week, we'll be here working away on the game and reading any of your comments/feedback!