Sipho News

We are proud announce a new extra-featured build. It is also a development milestone for us which marks a new Version 0.2.x era.

Starting Early Access we have promised to listen to your feedback. To not compromise existing balance and wanting to give a little bit of strategy between runs, we have implemented ability to keep a zooid after death!

This will allow to have a little bit more creative freedom in the main game mode by allowing you to strategically select a zooid to keep from previous run. New synergies can be explored this way without making the game too easy. Breed selection menu will now also display starting zooid loadout and plan ahead:


Implementing this feature has allowed us to make some under-the-hood changes to allow us affect game settings more easily. And it might be that little push that will help you to finally defeat Frakir and his minions.

Other thing we wanted to do even before launching to Early Access, but did not want to risk regressions, was to re-balance movement. There were some cases in early stages where an enemy would be faster than the player with several movers. Now movers have a lot less drag so movement should feel more responsive allowing you to create more interesting builds.



Together with aforementioned major changes, check out the full list:

• Increase gaps in Twisted Narrows
  
• Juice up zooid pickup effect
  
• Show adapted zooids in death screen
  
• Do not use impossible zooid placements for head selection siphos
  
• Give tank movement some love
  
• Damp siphonophore turning if there's high angular velocity
  
• Increase required spike velocity for full damage by 33%
  
• Display extra zooid in starting zooid panel
  
• Fix cursor escaping the game in multi-screen setups
  
• Added a pacifism achievement that can be achieved by finishing a level without killing anyone
  
• Show available zooids in selection panel
  
• Add Adapted zooid selection
  
• Randomly select zooids to stun instead of undefined order
  
• Fix Sizzler not stunning when there are a lot of zooids around
  
• Make heads have more mass and drag. Make movers have less drag and mass. Make siphos less deformable
  
• Make Spike weapon have 25% less drag
  
• Make grappling hook less abusable with pushers
  
• Don't error out when player has all zooids in inventory
  
• Kill dead zooids around zooid unlock pickup
  

Hello everyone!

It has been a crazy week after release and we are really happy about reception of Sipho. We have got loads of feedback from around us which will help us polish the game on all rough edges.

Some notable changes are increasing free spaces in areas later in the game. We got reports of navigating in those areas with a larger Sipho was hard, which was not intended. Such closed areas feel nice when Sipho just big enough to fit through, but later levels provide so much food that Sipho can be pretty wide and become easy prey if it gets stuck. To allow enjoy the game in any size we have increased passages and open areas in Buginis and Cra'Than areas.

Tutorial has been improved by removing lots of flavor text and leaving only most important information. Grasping a lot of information for the first time is a lot to ask, so we had to distill information to easy to understand highlighted sections. This was a also a good time to update Dash icon together with tutorial images. So skill bar has gotten some love too - all skills are now represented by their zooids or things they drop.



We have fixed several stability issues which interrupted play sessions. Game no longer will get stuck entering growth mode while entering boss fight. Game will not be saved when quitting, which in some rare cases resulted in player getting saved to the "void" which is an empty area. We have also potentially fixed a freeze on longer plays and if that still happens - let us know.

We also had version 0.1.7 in Beta [staging] branch, but wanted to do some testing before making it public. For those who are not using Beta [staging] branch both version changes are relevant:

• Don't save game outside of gameplay scenes
  
• Dive button chargers dive instead of diving instantly
  
• Fix zooid overlap exploit
  
• Larger spaces in later zones
  
• Moved zooid pickup to zooid effect layers so it's more visible
  
• Make Enemies react to poison
  

• Lower environment spike damage and add chip effect
  
• Make boss minions not chase player if it's outside battle area
  
• Make reward drop radii narrower
  
• Add more robust system for locking controls and cinematics. Refactor Gameplay scene loader to not use coroutines. This makes all kinds of transitions nicer
  
• Do not async load levels - fixes level loading after player has been allowed to move, resulting in stuck positions
  
• Don't save game when Sipho is dead
  
• Have area text controller in separate canvas
  
• Report error when loading area with no indices - will help us catch level load issues more easily
  
• Assert that we are saving valid area
  
• Make transition effect appear after postprocessing so it would properly fade to black
  
• Tweak Buginis boss battle activation position
  
• Add correct Frakir audio
  
• Return false if there are no spawners to update
  
• Fix reward UI sometimes erroring out on game exit
  
• Do not enter boss battle while game is paused
  
• Don't allow cheesing Frakir boss so easily and enrage early
  
• Make bone minions less predictable
  
• Destroy blueprint asset after saving it
  
• Simplify tutorial text and update images
  
• Remove italics in skill description and show energy usage as yellow text
  
• Rotate dragged skill as well
  
• Add movement skill icon
  
• Make tutorial text appear on top of decorations
  
• Set correct icons for skills
  
• Tweak skill bar looks
  
• Report game version to analytics
  

We are glad to announce that Sipho is finally available for everyone to enjoy!

After almost two years in development, we are very excited to finally have a game we are proud to share.

It all began in 2017 Global Game jam with idea of creating an underwater creature game, where your shape and actions mattered. After we had a demo, we felt we have created something interesting as we could just spend time looking at the game play itself. Over the time we have refined core of the game and improved looks and feel. We wanted underwater feel and have a good control in it. We have added more parts to the game and we wanted them to matter and act well together with other parts.



The creation process is not stopping, but rather accelerating. By listening to your Early Access feedback we will be able to tailor the game by your needs.

One common request we had from our testers was a Sandbox mode. After polishing and preparing Sipho for Early Access release we will now be able to start working on it. It will be called Aquarium, as it is more thematically fitting than Sandbox and will feature gameplay not limited by gamey win/lose constraints.

Another short term goal is to add full support for Joysticks as we believe games should be as accessible as possible. Currently game controls can be bound to joystick buttons, but some aspects of the game, like growth are not well fit for that use. We will work to make it feel as good as playing with mouse and keyboard.

Grab a build and let us know what you think!

Hi folks! We're here to give you some insights on what we've been doing.

Sipho has been in development for a year and a half now and we feel like we're getting close to release. Currently we're working on sprinkling the top levels of polish and adding the few missing bits and pieces of content.



One of our major concerns was teaching all the game systems and controls to new players. To that extent we've been reworking and improving the game tutorial to feature step-by-step instructions that gradually familiarize new players to the game. We hope this will allow people to quickly jump into the game.

We're also working on adding some new and unseen zooids into the mix. One of these is the grappling hook - it will allow attaching to enemies from afar or even navigating the world by grappling to nearby surfaces. Another new zooid that will be featured in the full game is the energy leech. While it does no damage, it saps the energy of foes while boosting it's own colony. The energy leech should combo very nicely with melee range skills and allow using expensive skills more often.



Lastly, we're working on improving and rethinking our level bosses. We want them to be a fun challenge - not too easy, but also beatable with a certain playstyle. We want to avoid forcing players to build in a specific way just to be able to beat the bosses, so this is a tough balancing act.

We're also constantly iterating and adding new art assets to Sipho, trying to nail that creepy underwater aesthetic. One of the new sprites is the egg sack that replaces the previous art for our nutrition container. Now you're chewing up eggs for nutrition, yum!



We hope that this update has been informative. Keep an eye out for more updates!

Yours, team Sipho.