April Dev Transmission
Hi everyone,
Our current main focus is on what will be the headline addition for Major Update 3. This aims to give a greater amount of variety and ‘spikiness’ in campaigns and individual battles.
To elaborate on that, enemy boarding parties will be infected with randomised Combat Hazards, something that will pass to you when you engage them in battle and stack up throughout a campaign. To offset this, they’ll each carry an Encounter Reward that will be granted when you defeat them.
We’ve been having great fun coming up with dozens of hazards and rewards, and the nature of how they tie into a campaign can provide some fantastic combinations and surprises along the way. I’ll avoid going into too much detail on this right now, but we’re looking forward to hearing about your own suggestions for hazards and rewards once you get your hands on the update.
In order to communicate this new system, we’ve taken the opportunity to rework how the Ship Overview is presented. This not only allows us to provide extra information that will result in more meaningful decisions, but also lays the groundwork for some new features coming after MU3. Here’s a sneak peek, although bear in mind some visuals are placeholder:
This required quite a bit of unpicking of the old format, so for SENTRY veterans some of the changed locations of buttons/UI may take a bit of getting used to!
You’ll be pleased to know the Deploy box will now show what enemy types are present in that boarding party – and if the sub system is below 100% health, then the repair information is always displayed, not just when you have the resources to make the repair!
New Deployable!
The Flechette Strip is a straight-forward damage dealing deployable that spits out metal projectiles:
As you can see from the concept, rather than the usual square deployable shape this is long and thin. Because it can be rotated to place horizontally or vertically it offers a lot of flexibility in its potential placement locations.
New Enemies!
Alex has created a higher and lower tier variant of the Storm Warden, which brings it in line with the other enemy archetypes with tier variants.
A few people have asked where the higher (red) tiered enemies went in the last update – don’t worry, they will be making a return…
Polishing New Levels and Melee Weapons!
In our last update we mentioned that we had created two new levels plus two melee weapons –these have been with our Discord Playtesters who have been providing their thoughts, so Sean has been working through their feedback and making the necessary adjustments.
If you missed the last update and want to read about what those new levels and melee weapons were, check out the post here.
Devlog!
In case you missed it, Sean also created a video covering the co-op update:
Abandon Ship!
I’ve been occasionally grabbing a bit of time to do a free content update to our previous game, which you can read about here.
While our focus is very much on SENTRY, I thought it worth mentioning to show that we still like to support our last game even though it’s over 5 years old now. Expect SENTRY to receive that kind of love even when it’s several years beyond full release!
From the Community!
This month Discord member Busy Bee (who also goes by LittleMissCalculated on DeviantArt) has mocked up their idea for a new Electric Flamethrower type weapon they’d love to see. They explained that while it wouldn’t do weak spot damage it would do increased damage to armoured enemies and require getting up close to be most effective:
Keep sharing anything cool with us!
If you’d like to provide any feedback you can do so through our channels below – we try to respond as much as we can, but even if we don’t personally reply we read and note everything. Here’s a bunch of links to where we can be reached:
Thanks for your continued support!
