Activated Skills + Discord!

IBOLOGY LLC , developer of Approaching Infinity and The Curse of Yendor, now has its own dedicated Discord server.

Join us!

• Talk to other players
  
• Share your victories, defeats, and videos
  
• Ask (and get answers to) all your questions
  
• Suggest your own ideas that could make the game better
  
• Tell the developer what you think is missing
  
• Help decide what's coming next!
  
• Access information that's not available anywhere else.
  

What's new in version 1.6i3?



Cybernetic Skill Modules

Activated skills are finally here! Once an officer reaches level 2, they can begin to equip skill modules that enable them to do some pretty awesome things, like detecting monsters, teleporting, and automatically shooting while moving.

But these skill modules must be *found* first! You'll need to search shipwrecks, caves, star temples, and other loot-filled areas before you can start using them.

Skills are powered by a new item called cybernetic gel, which comes in 5 colors: blue, red, yellow, green, and purple. If you don't have the right kind of gel, your skills will take twice as long to recharge!



Divisions
The colors of gel (and the skills themselves) correspond to a new characteristic of your officers called "division". There are 10 playable classes in Approaching Infinity, and each class belongs to 1 of 5 divisions: curiosity (blue), combat (red), systems (yellow), social (green), and environmental (purple).

For example, the engineering and navigation classes fall under the "systems" division. They use yellow gel and have the skills EMP, repair, teleport, and deploy cover.



At level 4, an officer can equip 2 skills simultaneously, but that's the maximum. So if you have both a diplomacy and operative specialist, both at level 4 or higher, you could equip all 4 green (social) skills simultaneously.


Skills are activated either by shortcut keys or by clicking them in the 8th info window.








Items in cargo hold now show how much cargo space they take up.



You can now choose whether an away-team weapon you're installing goes in your main slot or your swap slot.



You can install components and devices directly from the cargo hold menu, just by clicking them! Everything will go right where it's supposed to, but in certain cases, it will ask where to put it, or what to remove.



Tooltips on new game screen.

You can now see longer skill descriptions, as well as what division an officer class belongs to, and what activated skills they will be able to use:



The descriptions of skills are now even more explicit, showing "how much" a skill changes your abilities: like "+5 per level". Any time a number is implied but not shown, it's because the relationship is not "linear": there's no easy way to explain it. But all skills are meant to be useful and of relatively comparable power, so you should feel confident taking any skill.


(I mentioned this for the beta, but I think everyone needs to know about it)


Make sure you're ready to leave a star temple before you get the artifact!

One good reason to explore the whole thing first is that force-field rooms on star temples are a great place to find the new skill modules. There's an even better reason, but I'll let you discover it for yourself ;)


I WON!



For only the 2nd time ever, I won Approaching Infinity, on normal difficulty, with perma-death on. And what's more, I did it entirely on video!

Back in November, I started recording a run from scratch, to see how the balance of the game felt to me. I think I know my game, but do I? Some things definitely felt too easy. But a major focus of version 1.6 has been "re-balancing", and monster difficulty increases (and monster skills!) are coming soon.

It's kind of amazing to go back and see all the features and changes that were released along the way. There were plenty of times when I discovered a bug and then by the next video, it was fixed. It's satisfying to be able to show progress like that.



Approaching Infinity still has years of development and evolution to go... thanks for joining me on this journey!