November Dev Transmission
Hello everyone, here’s the latest SENTRY news!
Co-op!
At the start of the month we launched the first public co-op test (details here), which was focused on putting the combat side of co-op through its paces. We did a lot of private testing among our Discord community before we opened this up on Steam, but it was encouraging to see that it handled the greater volume of players well – so to everyone that tested this, a massive thank-you!
While we’ve got a list of things we’d like to improve/add in future, because there weren’t any emergency issues we felt it was better to plough on with the full campaign co-op. The basic navigator and overview are all networking correctly and we’re currently deep in adding the proper menu flow. Beyond that, it’s just ensuring that the progression functions as it should, for example equipment discovered (and banked) while playing in a co-op partner’s campaign should then appear in your own profile for use in future sessions (whether those be in singleplayer, joining a friend or your friend joining you).
For the combat co-op test, it worked well ironing out the issues with our lovely Discord playtesters first before rolling this out to an open test on Steam, and we’ll follow the same procedure with the campaign co-op test. So Discord peeps: keep an eye on the announcement channel in December for news on this test 🙂
The existing combat co-op test will be available to play until the full campaign co-op is ready.
A sneak peek!
With our sole programmer being occupied with co-op, recently Sean and Alex have been either working on new levels – one of which you’ll have seen in the combat co-op test, or queuing up content for after Major Update 2 – so I thought it might be cool for you to see just a snippet of some of what we have in the pipeline. Big caveats apply with showing early work of course – it’s likely to change, has working titles, could ultimately get rejected etc.
First up is some new equipment. The Shuriken is an active ability that bounces from target to target, while the overhead laser is a ceiling-based deployable. The Steam Jets cover too many bases at the moment, so they’ll be adjusted to perform a slightly different function (like damage-over-time) which then provides an opening for this new instant-damage-dealing trap.
Melee weapons were a popular request, so a high-frequency blade and stun-stick are the two we’re looking at making next:
Not to be outdone, the Collective have reinforcements en route:
The two flyers will be larger than the current breed. While one will perform heavy bombardments from afar, the other will boost nearby enemies. The creature on the right will have a special ability that disables nearby deployables.
We’ve picked these enemies as next up in the queue because their behavior is different from the existing roster, and should provide an additional consideration when it comes to target prioritisation – you probably don’t want to leave an enemy that boosts allies for too long, nor one that temporarily disables your defences…
Next up is another alien – but this one isn’t trying to kill you!
(we haven’t decided on the colour scheme yet)
These vendors will appear on the navigator, and visiting nodes with their vessels present will allow you to see what equipment they have for sale, which should make getting those missing weapons etc. a bit easier to obtain.
Finally – and while there’s nothing visual to accompany this – one thing you will see in Major Update 2 is that enemies now have differing escape costs – so a larger escaping enemy will do more damage to the sub-system health than a tiny one. As this nudges the difficulty higher, Sean has done some equipment rebalancing to compensate.
He’s also been adding more wave types – partly in preparation for when we do the next campaign above Starfarer – but you’ll see some of these changes bleed into the existing campaigns too.
From the Community!
We’ll finish off this post with some cool stuff from the community.
Discord user Jajomba is always digging around in the game files, so we had a good chuckle when he took our alien soldier and modded him into Bomb Rush Cyberfunk:
If you have (or see) any cool SENTRY-related stuff, send it my way 🙂
Feedback is invaluable help in improving the game, so keep it coming! You can reach us on all these places:
Thanks for the support, it’s been great to see the campaign co-op coming along – but we’re equally excited about returning to the long list of things we want to improve and new features to add once Major Update 2 has been released! And just a heads up, the December Dev Transmission will be posted a bit earlier as we’ll be taking the Christmas week off.
