Skillshot City News

Well that took longer than expected. We've been in Early Access for over a year now, and I've only just completed reworking the singleplayer campaign. This version polishes the final 4 stages, updating them with all the cool improvements I've made over the past year. There are story rewrites too. The completion of the campaign marks a huge turning point in the development of Geneshift, as I'll be shifting focus back onto multiplayer and marketing after this. It also makes my self-diagnosed OCD happy that it took a nice, clean 10 versions to rework the campaign.




How will you know the new campaign is awesome? Because the game will constantly remind you whenever you do something cool. My favorite thing about this version (apart from the relief of finally finishing the campaign) are awesome points. Awesome points are awarded when you perform extra well during combo kills, and give you XP and a skill-point or a phaser.

This gif below shows them in action, as well as the new cash drop animation. Cash no longer drops on every single kill, but instead happens randomly about 30% of the time. This means you earn far less cash during the campaign, and really makes every kill and every dollar far more valuable and necessary to survive.




You now have the ability to buy skill points in the campaign for $2000 a pop. This, combined with the buffing of a bunch of skills, adds a lot of flavour to the game. You can also level skills all the way up to level 5 now, allowing for some fairly ridiculous skill combos. Awesome points also award skill-points too. With all of this, I've reworked a bunch of skill values (see the changelog below) to ensure that all skills are useful and the more points you invest into the skill, the better it becomes.




I have changed the permissions for demo users, allow them to now play in permanent and ranked servers. This is done for the benefit of paying players, as these servers will now become more populated. Permanent servers are one of Geneshift's most unique multiplayer features, and now we'll be able to enjoy them again!




To celebrate 1 year in Early Access and the completion of the campaign, I've created a new trailer showing off all the new features added so far. Check it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOV0gG9CXcE

Now that the campaign is done it's marketing time. I'm finally happy for gamers to see the game. So over the coming weeks expect to see more players in the servers. I'm going to be sending emails to relevant youtubers and try get some love from them. If you want to invite your friends to play the free multiplayer in the demo, now would be a great time!

Have fun and please give me feedback here or in Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/geneshift

GENERAL CHANGES

• Massively reworked the final 4 stages of the campaign.
  
• Community Credits now get +200 for buying the game and +50 for adding a reference.
  
• Demo users can now join Permanent matches and Ranked servers.
  
• You can now purchase skill points in the campaign for $2000 each.
  
• Reduced the cost of many campaign unlocks.
  
• Improved the graphical effects of collecting cash from guards.
  
• Long custscenes can now be skipped by pressing ESC in-game.
  
• Synergies have been removed from the campaign, allowing you to level straight up to level 5 with normal skill points.
  
• You no longer lose $200 whenever you die. Instead you gain $500 if you complete a stage without dying.
  
• Holding middle mouse now opens the skill rose and defaults to selecting instead of auto casting. It also pauses the campaign.
  

GAMEPLAY CHANGES

• Awesome Points now occur when you do something awesome, awarding +300xp and a phaser or a skill point.
  
• Guards now drop cash only 1/3rd of the time. Making cash a lot more rare and valuable.
  
• The kill combo system has slightly new multiplier values and a longer timer (4s instead of 3s).
  
• Guards occassionally drop health and mana, healing you for +50hp. This happens about 10% of the time.
  
• Mana no longer regenerates up to 20 mana in stealth.
  
• Barrier mana burn is now 2 mana/s instead of 3 mana/s.
  
• Guards now do about 50% more damage, though there is a smarter dynamic difficulty system in place.
  
• Playful guards now have 100hp instead of 50, but their damage is 50% less instead.
  
• Superweapons now only cost $5000 instead of $10000, but have half as much ammo in PvP modes.
  

SKILL CHANGES

• Force Field explosion damage now ranges from 60 to 40 instead of 60 to 20.
  
• Venom Shot has been flipped from levels 1 to 5.
  
• Venom Shot damage vs guards is now x4 instead of x3 (ensuring it
• does enough to kill).
  Venom Shot mana cost is now 15 instead of 20.
  
• Vampirism now restores mana against guards ranging from 2% to 6%.
  
• Phasic Bullets no longer needs Energize.
  
• Bullet Time now unlocks at level 0.
  
• Static Charges now unlocks at level 5.
  
• Self Repair mana cost is now 20 instead of 30.
  
• Radiate damage is now 35hp/s instead of 30hp/s.
  
• Radiate now does x1.5 damage vs guards.
  
• Blade Fury mana cost is now 25 instead of 20.
  
• Blade Fury can now be burst after 4s instead of after the full cooldown.
  
• Blade Fury has switched from levels 1 to 5.
  
• Blade Fury max damage no longer applies to guards or zombies.
  
• Plasma Ball has been flipped from levels 1 to 5.
  
• Plasma Ball mana cost is now 25 instead of 20.
  
• Plasma Ball now does x3 damage vs guards instead of x1.5.
  

BUG FIXES

• Massively improved the performance when you have a lot of idle vehicles in the map.
  
• AI now enters the correct vehicle when following you.
  
• Fixed a bug displaying the top cash earners in each campaign stage.
  

Fasten your seatbelts, we're about to enter Valve time. All the coolest moments in the campaign have been given a bit of slow motion just to make you feel extra badass. There is literally no point to this feature. Check it out in this gif below:




Talk about efficient gif usage! The animation above also shows off the new vehicle camera. Your vehicle is no longer fixed in the very centre of the screen. Instead, the camera will now shift forward slightly, allowing you to see further ahead and plan where you're going to turn next. This feature has been requested for a long time and really makes driving easier.


This is a pretty big addition, and something I've needed for a long time. There are now green barriers that block AI vision. They're effectively doors that enemy guards cannot see through. They will disable if you shoot or walk through them, but until then you are free to observe your enemy and plan your attack before the shit hits the fan. In the gif below you can see the guard walk past, and only after the door is disabled does he spot me.




Yet another map has been polished up with all the new features added over hte past 10 months. Residence, S04 starts off with a sexy slow motion vehicle sequence (as shown in the gif above), and has been polished from start to finish. Next version will focus entirely on the rest of the campaign, and finally finish up a years worth of work redoing the singleplayer.

Anyway that's all for this version. Have fun and please give me feedback here or in Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/geneshift

Step aside Google, Geneshift now has self driving cars! That's right, cars can now be driven by bots. This has allowed me to add a bunch of cool new sections to the campaign, including escort missions, chase sequences and general man vs car combat. Get your bazookas ready cause you'll have a lot of cars to shoot! Check out this sweet totally unscripted gif:




Why walk when you can run? Why run when you can shift!? I've added a great new feature called Phase Shfting that makes movement way more tactical. Simply tap the shift key and you will now blink forward in an instant, dodging enemy grenades, escaping to cover, or charging in at your enemy with a knife. In PvP each player has 3 shifts, and can use them all up to get instant bursts of speed. After using a shift it will take 2 seconds to replenish, so you need to time them well.

This new system is a lot of fun, and best of all, the title "GeneSHIFT" finally makes sense, as shifting is now a key mechanic in the game.




Ok so we already had car boosting, but now it LOOKS awesome. Like actual fire comes out the back of your car. I've also made the boost mechanic a lot tighter. Your boost bar only lasts 3s now, but you get some real speed because of it. This is better than the old boost which lasted forever but barely increased your speed at all. That was more of a general speed increase, but now boosting really feels like a tactical maneuver. It sounds awesome too.




This version continues the slow but steady polishing of the campaign. Downtown (map 3) now joins Laboratory and Subway as being fully polished up with all the new features I've added over the last few versions. It focuses especially on vehicle combat using the new AI driving, and starts with a very groovy escort mission. In fact escort missions are now actually possible, as you can now fail a stage when AI characters die. This allowes for timed challenges and a bunch of other fun things.

Anyway that's all for this version. Have fun and please give me feedback here or in Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/geneshift

In the not so wise words of EA, this version will give you a sense of pride and accomplishment. How you ask? By completely reworking the progression system. This new system adds strategy, gives cash a purpose, and lets you personalize your character as you progress through the game. Holy buzzwords batman, let's read on!




The old system was very simple. You discovered an item in the map and from that point on you could access it in the buy menu. This was great and all, but it meant that everyone had the exact same build. You were progressing, but it wasn't customizable and there wasn't any strategy or excitement to it.

This new system adds a simple step that fixes this. When you discover an item in the map it becomes "discovered", but now it is not immediately unlocked. To fully unlock it you must actually buy it in the menu screen shown above. You buy it with cash earned from the campaign. This single change makes the progression system a lot more interesting:

1) Cash now has long term value as it is needed to progress. This gives you an incentive to get those sick combo kills, and also introduces an "end game" grinding stage for completionists.

2) Your build is now personalized and requires strategy. Do you spend your remaining $8000 unlocking the M4A1 or Force Fields?

3) You can now get excited about cool items. Before you were just given Invisibility before you even knew what it did. There was no anticipation. Now you'll actually care when you finally invest the $20,000 required to unlock it.




Check out this cool new STAGE CLEAR thingy. It shows up when you kill the last enemy on each stage and makes you feel like a badass. I've also made the HUD a bit cleaner and given everything a sci-fi blue tint.

With the release of this version I think I'm 100% done with the "systems" aspect of the campaign. Everything is in place now. Now I just need to go through and polish up the actual stages themselves to work with all the cool new features I've been adding. Next version is going to be a whole new game!

A few nice changes in this version, the biggest one being a completely reworked menu system. I should have done this earlier, because it looks great and first impressions are oh so important. We've also got some nice changes to the campaign and yet another new combo kill system.




The menu has been reworked in a few ways. The overall aesthetic has been improved with a cool new blue background and new textures. The actual navigation has been changed too, with a dedicated main menu which lets you go into and out of the individual pages. This results in far fewer buttons on the screen at one time and is less overwhelming to new players. Even the options menu has been resdesigned with a new "common options" page that hides most of the advanced settings that no one cares about.




I've yet again reworked the Kill Combo system, but I think I've got it perfect this time. There is no longer any confusing cash multiplier step that indirectly affects how much money you get per kill. The new system simply gives you extra cash directly. Instead of a double kill increasing you multiplier by 20% so that future kills give more cash, now a double kill just straight up gives you $150 for a kill instead of $100. Easy!

There is still the concept of "special kills" which also award extra cash, and if you combo these together you get more money faster. Kills must be made within 3s of eachother to increase the combo. Here are some examples:

Normal Kill: $100
Road Kill: $150
Stealth Kill: $150
Double Kill: $100, then $150
Double Road Kill: $150, then $250


In the campaign there are no longer level restrictions when you unlock skills. This means you can now unlock high level skills like Teleportation at level 1! Before you had to wait till you reached level 10 to be able to do this, so with this change these skills are FAR more useful. I'm curious to see how this affects speedruns.




In the screenshot above you can see two barricades blocking off the top doors. This is a new feature that replaces the old doors that were hacked together with models. These are better not only because they're animated and sound cool, but because they go down into the ground when they're closed. The old models stayed the same but simply because walkable, which made it really hard to tell if you could go through them or not.


General Changes

• The menu has been reworked, graphically and with a new naviation system.
  
• The options menu features a new "common options" section that hides away most of the advanced settings.
  
• There are now three presets in the options menu that easily adjust your graphical settings.
  
• Tweaked a bunch of text and fonts throughout the menu system.
  

Campaign Changes

• Skills can now be unlocked at any level in the campaign.
  
• Help Text is now shown as a separate popup down the bottom of the screen, instead of being spoken by guards.
  
• A new animated barricade type exists to replace some of the old doors, making it clearer if you can or cannot pass through.
  
• The Kill Combo system has been reworked, now rewarding extra cash for special and combo kills directly.
  
• On each stage players can now compete for the total cash earned in the stage, rather than compete over the highest cash multiplier (which no longer exists).
  
• The loading screen between campaign stages now has animated text to build suspense when you see your end of round stats.
  
• Made some general tweaks to Laboratory and Subway.
  

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where vehicles would get stuck on the sides of walls.
  
• Fixed a performance issue on some systems.
  
• Honestly I fixed a bunch of other things, but I forgot to add them to the changelog this version. Lots of good stuff, go enjoy!