Hi everyone! Sky Base Venus will have an early beta / playtest soon (TM). If you are interested in helping find bugs and other issues with the game, you can now sign up for the playtest on the Sky Base Venus store page on Steam. Invites will be sent out once the game is ready for the playtest to start.
* When retrying after losing to Bolt, you should go back to fighting Strike and not start with 0 health * Soft-lock when hitting enter after loading should stop. * Quality settings should close when viewed / updated in Story Mode screen.
Ever since the Mutation Creation Contest I've had this urge to implement a Bouncy Mutation. Many shoot-em-up games have this because bounciness is chaos and chaos is fun. You can land trick shots over corners, get surprised by enemy fire that bounces off or even create some Rube Goldberg machines. These are the ultimate goal of Sipho - a collection of mechanics that complement each other and allow creating complex systems for you to have fun with and beat the game.
A new Bounce Stat was added and a Mutation to go along with it
Thus the Bounce Stat has been added - as of now, only used by Projectile weapons - Flak, Sniper, Soul Eater and Sprayer. In the future other Zooids might support Bounce stat too, however, it can be trickier to balance as bounce can sometimes be non-beneficial. One of benefits of having some Bounce is to guarantee your shots in tight areas. Now what do I use to reach that food?
For Projectiles Bounce works by keeping an internal counter of "remaining bounces". When a projectile hits a solid, non damageable object it checks if it has bounces left and bounces off if it does. If it doesn't - it dies as usual. This works with Obstacles and even with Spikes and Flails - projectiles can bounce off them!
Aquarium Obstacle Menu Overhaul
One of the silent and huge updates we had some time ago was updating Aquarium content. This was motivated by the need to tidy-up obstacle names for future game translations and update the old content in general. As a result we now have a pretty nifty spawnable object categorization with previews:
Notice the pleasing column/row ratio 😩👌
It is now also possible to change at which depth objects are spawned - on, below or above playable surfaces. In future, Decorations and Obstacles should become one category - as spawning Obstacles at non-collidable layers makes them Decorations and some Decorations can be interesting to collide with or even have some gameplay function.
Tooling, like changing depth or moving already spawned obstacles is also something I keep in mind.
Shady Business
One of graphical improvements that I really wanted to do for a long time were shadows. Fancy name for a simple thing - blurry black outlines that get thicker if an object covers another object from higher distance.
Sipho action happens in deep waters and I really want to emphasize the atmosphere of this depth. While 2D by definition does not have depth we can do some tricks. One of which is parallax to add depth to lower layers - the deeper things are, the less they "move" when camera moves. This trick only works for deeper than playable layer. Playable layer can't have parallax as it would creation confusion around collisions. Higher layer in theory could have parallax, but it felt too distracting. So to add some depth emphasis on all layers at once I added Ambient Occlusion effect. It can be tweaked in Graphics Options for your liking!
There is some good stuff hidden in the patch notes - movement improvements, performance optimisations for late game, secret features.
Version 0.9.5f1
Add Tier 3 Projectile weapon bounce mutation
Use Factions to determine what Mutations UI represents
Remove separate debuff drag logic and use stat-baed logic for Muck - fixes spazzing out
Modify third Buginis Boss arena walls to have less sharp corners that Siphos can get stuck on
Add Bounce stat, icons, description
Skill use also gets queried in Fixed Update - fixes skipping input for fast skills when framerate is low
Cache Shell Grower results which greatly improves performance for Siphos with large amount of far-reaching Chitins
Add GetAllNeighborZooids variant with HashSet which has optimized search for Contains()
Destructible objects can be indestructible
Version 0.9.4f8
Experimental symmetrical building by holding Alt button
Handle single zooid sipho velocities better when trying to move
Update angular velocity after zooid rotations were updated - fixes incorrect velocities at frame-after-frame level
Add ZooidDeep layer and use it for Deep zooid. Deep is no longer affected by Pushers and Twisters. Deep collides with large obstacles
Mines no longer explode on contact with Consumables
Version 0.9.4f7
Puffer spike thicker
Fix Auto Grow messing things up
Detached/Reattached zooids can get callback
Tweak Tank movement to work with new movement logic
Enable Ambient Occlusion in Postprocessing Profiles
Correct offset falloff and handle inverse orientation
Better constraint tester
Add perpendicular function
Use interpolated Zooid transform positions instead of physics positions when positioning Zooid Growth buttons and Growth Point indicators - fixes them being offset when Sipho is edited in high motion
Fix some nested particle effects getting incorrectly scaled
Support more debug vectors
Extract Rotation constraint calculation method for easier debugging
Apparently I could save one normalization in rotation constraint - more Soft Body Physics performance!
Soften up sentence for The Condemned One and allow it to be included in builds
Apply position and rotation offsets after constraints are calculated - fixes symmetrical builds with contracting muscle zooids spinning out of control
Howdy! I hope you like this video where I explain some of the driving ideas/features behind this video game that I'm making. ːsteamthumbsupː ːsteamthumbsupː ːsteamthumbsupː ːsteamthumbsupː
The game has been updated to version 2.88. This build is one version behind the Patreon version. If you would like to access builds early, consider becoming a patron
I've noticed that not all maps spawn the guardians at the end. I've adjusted the timing, so 3 types should spawn now. Each of them drop slightly better loot (I won't spoil it by saying), but they are extremely difficult to kill.
Players should expect up to 110% more performance on some generated winter maps
Players should expect up to 90% more performance on some generated autumn maps
Players should expect up to 7% more performance on some generated summer maps
"Bug" fixes
Leaderboard
In Normal mode, you can now access the match leaderboard even if you finish in first place! (Believe it or not, previously the leaderboard was not visible if your AI won the Battle Royale. 😅)