• Made enemy Direct-Fire gunners better at leading a moving target
• Fixed recruiting some underage crewmen
• Added button to cancel expansion pack downloads

😍 New dance moves:
Club dancing. Movement: 07
Club Dancing. Movement: 08

Hello again, NIMRODS!

We've got something really exciting to show you guys today! We're going to talk about the new options we want to provide to all of the NIMRODS when we hit our Early Access release! That's right; today's post is going to be on our newest project: The Options Screen!


Work in Progress

Okay, okay, I kid. We know that the options screen isn't what you guys are looking for in a Devlog, and that's not the main subject of today's post. But it is something we've been working on.

And sometimes that's the way game development works. A lot of oft-requested features make their home in the options menu, such as keybindings, and they've got to be coded out, even if it's not glamorous. After all, a good options screen goes a long way towards making a game feel professional and polished. But it doesn’t make for the most exciting devlog.

So as we finish polishing up the options screen, let's talk about the actual subject of today's post: Augments!

Out of all the feedback we've gotten, the augment system is the thing we've gotten the most positive feedback on. Players love the way that augments can mix and match, and we feel like our gun building system is second to none. So, obviously we're going to lean into it!

For Early Access, we're not adding new lines of augments, but we are adding a fourth tier to every branch of every augment line. Those with calculators handy can derive that that means 58 new augments will be in the game, eight per slot! (Except the underbarrel slot gets 10... we could probably write an entire Devlog on how that came to be.)

We've done a lot of these augments earlier, some as early as last October, and we were just waiting for the right time to tease them. Given that we've been hard at work on an unglamorous options screen, this seems to be the time!

The first Tier 4 augment to show off is an upgrade to the Hellsplitter Barrel called the Bullet Hell Barrel.
Why bother aiming when you can just spray bullets indiscriminately everywhere instead?


Work in Progress

The bullets all do significantly less damage than they would before you took the Bullet Hell Barrel, but if all of them were to land, you'd end up dealing way more damage per second than any other barrel of this tier. This means for the Bullet Hell Barrel to make the most sense, you'd want to be surrounded by monsters as much as possible... or guarantee your hits by using some other augment...

Another augment we're excited about is the Tech Module: Sightsword.

This augment came about when Zerk was playing around with the Containment Field and asked the team "What if this were a rectangle instead of a circle, and the long end of the rectangle faced towards your cursor?"



I felt like there was still room for "aura" based builds where you were encased in a sphere of bullets, but the idea of directing your Containment Field with your vision was too cool to pass up. This made it feel natural for one branch of the Tech Module; you could either take a route that makes your Containment Field more defensively oriented, or a branch that makes it more aggressive.

But why have a boring rectangle when you could have a freakin' fifteen-foot long sword blade!


Work in Progress

Fire your gun a lot, fill your sword-shaped containment field up with bullets, then swing your cursor around to slam all your bullets into enemies. It's super fun! Just be careful not to swing your sightsword into a rock. You know how they love to eat bullets.

I mentioned on the forums that we were planning to "weaponize" XP. Here's how! Named after the real-life dangerously powerful rare earth magnets. The Neodymium Magnigrip causes any XP that you pick up to rip through enemies and damage them.



This is an interesting augment in my opinion because it converts Collection Range, a utility stat, into damage; the longer your collection range, the more likely there is to be one—or multiple!—Enemies between you and the XP you're picking up. It makes positioning more interesting and combos well with several other augments that give you increased pickup range when a certain trigger occurs.

I love the idea of orbital bullets. Right now, that mechanic is only included on the Orbital Dissuasion Barrel, which is only used in some niche high-armor builds because of how much power is dedicated to that barrel's triggered ability.

I was trying to figure out where else we could use that tech, and the Immolative Emitter seemed like a perfect fit; its purpose was to spray fire everywhere, right? Well what if you were in the center of a fire tornado?


Work in Progress

We've got the shield grip in the game right now, and it occupies a nice role: A small pool of what basically amounts to extra HP, except that it's got its own unusually-fast regeneration mechanic.

The Tier 4 version adds a new interesting complication: When the shield breaks, it damages all enemies on the screen:


Work in Progress

This takes the shield's recharge mechanics a step further; instead of wanting to stay at your maximum shield as much as possible, this incentivizes you playing on the edge a little. It's obviously super useful on builds where you want to get hit, making the Shield Projector branch competitive with the Spiked Grip for the grip slot in those sorts of builds.

In conclusion, we think augments are great and are always looking to expand the builds players can make. Tier 4 is as high as our Augments will get in the forseeable future; once we finish up our EA release, our plans are to make a fifth Augment for each slot. Something to look forward to well down the road!

Does this give you any build ideas? Want to speculate on what the Tier 4 for your favorite upgrade might be?

Come hang out in our Discord!

Until next time, NIMROD!
~Talonos

- Blights. Blessings will sometimes come with a blight, which applies a debuff for a moderate duration in exchange for more powerful buffs from the blessing.
- Movement trail VFX on XP pickups
- Spell UI flashes red if trying to use it when it's not ready
- Minor UI tweaks
- Optimized SFX virtualization and culling for better overall performance
- Fixed looping issues on some enemy SFX
- Fixed electric bolts not accurately targeting some enemies
- Fixed blessing UI being active when starting a new run if player died at a specific time during the level up sequence

Howdy survivors!

It’s been a crazy month and we have finally made it to the April Patch (v0.4.9). We were gearing towards a nomad-themed update; however, you’ll see there are some more goodies involved!

• Build parts for taking over houses.
  
• Build parts for camping in the woods.
  
• Giant Stone walls? (not too nomadic, but still cool).
  
• A big bear rug!
  
• Pineapples! Or a sneaky stash? You decide.

• Increased shooting speed and damage.
  
• Built upon existing logic to increase their detection IQ.
  
• Several new Scav Strongholds were added!

• New Backtrack Music!
  
• Assigned more sounds to work with the settings audio sliders.
  
• No Geiger Counter will play when in cover now.

• Quests now persist after death.
  
• Quests now unlock purchasable items from traders.
  
• Removed vendor items that can be found elsewhere.
  
• Other market changes & economic balances.

• New MainLevel road work & street infrastructure.
  
• Infinite trees are fixed (hopefully).
  
• Made nav mesh cover more tiles so zombies don’t lose agro as much.

• Fast & Slow Types.
  
• Many other unique types spawn certain items & in specific areas (Police stations will now spawn cops & prisoners with specific loot).
  
• Zeds can now open doors from the back side :o
  
• Added more zombie spawn points.

• Tiered out melee weapon damage.
  
• Added 2 new melees!

• Ownership box in stairs.
  
• Bagged greens were OP.

• “No PvE” World Setting now works!
  
• Repair bench now saves what’s in it!
  
• Zombies can no longer spawn within the Ownership sphere (again)!
  
• Build part bag on the ground only spawns if something is in the bench’s inventory.
  
• Crafting Recipes Changes
  
• Radiation Zones Rework (Depending on what zone you’re in)

If you are in the ZSGO Discord, you know many changes are coming over the next month or 2. This includes transitioning to Unreal Engine 5.3, continuing to improve our dedicated servers, and welcoming new members to the ZSGO team! It’s an exciting time, and we can’t wait to see what the future holds!

We also have a limited edition item coming out soon, only 25 are going to be made. :o
More info on that in the Discord ;)

Good luck out there survivors!!!

It's Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop's 7th birthday, which means it's time for our second annual mapping competition!

The theme this year is Space Station. Create a standalone mission (of any type) that takes place on a space station or other large spaceship. Here are some ideas to get you started:

• A deathmatch mission with hazards that can be activated via panels scattered around the ship.
  
• An endless mission where civilians must be rescued from a derelict space station while keeping life support active.
  
• A mission where marines must fight their way through enemy soldiers to stop the ship's reactor from melting down.
  
• A mission where marines clear out a space station that is still being affected by the portal storms that preceded the seven hour war, full of warring Xen creatures.
  
• A mission where marines need to download critical data from computers on a space station that is actively falling apart.
  
• A mission where marines investigate the ruins of a space station that has reentered the atmosphere of a planet and crashed.

Missions can be submitted via the Steam Workshop using the SpaceStation2024 tag between now and June 1st, 2024 at 00:00 UTC.

Entering will earn you a medal unique to this contest once submissions close, and the winning entry will receive an additional medal unique to that entry. High quality entries may also be featured in Heroes of the Interstellar Armed Forces.

I'm happy to present you a big update with the new mechanics and quality of life stuff! This update introduces three new machines called "Stabilizers". The first one becomes available after encountering the first surge and locating Elmerine. Placing a stabilizer near a surge (being careful not to accidentally collapse it) allows it to harness the surge's power for a few minutes. The effect varies depending on the type of surge and scales with its grade, which is indicated by its size and the number of stars in a stabilizer's tooltip. There are three surge grades. Higher grades produce stronger and more frequent effects. The same goes for the stabilizers. The second stabilizer becomes available at a certain point in the game's progression, and the third one is quite tricky to discover. These stabilizers offer different ways for progressing through the game or can be ignored in favor of simply collecting resources from surges.

SPOILER ALERT. The effects of the surges. I strongly suggest you to explore stabilizers on your own at first.
Charonite surge: Boosts a random channel for a short amount of time.
Elmerine: Tries to refill a random building.
Qanetite: Hits a random cube with the force dependant on the surge grade
Beta-Pylene: Hits a random cube containing Beta-Pylene, knocking it out of the cube and leaving mostly Charonite. Damages the cube.
Hell Gem: Boosts a random converter.
Chromalit: Spawns a surge. Just one Chromalit surge can be stabilized.
Celestial Foam: Forces immediate annihilation of one Hell Gem with one cube of Celestial Foam.
Hollow Stone: Spawns a Hollow Stone
Void: Recharges one second-grade stabilizer and dies out shortly after. And something else.
Reality: Recharges all the symbols to some degree, depending on the grade of the surge. And something else.

What else is there:
+ Now you can swap buildings when relocating them with [E]
+ UI is scaled for big screens
+ Added hints telling if a machine can be moved or copied in [Alt] mode
+ Ctrl+w shouldn't affect other apps now
+ Converters now show their output in a tooltip
+ New Neophobia achievement
+ Fill director stops pointing to machines immediately after a click
+ Zoom level doesn't reset on restart
+ Fullscreen setting persists
+ Added relocation to gamepad controls (leftmost round button, [x] on xbox or [square] on ps controller)
+ Fixed a few bugs in a gamepad support
+ Chat scrolls to the most recent text by default
+ Romanian language is added to the game
+ General Decay Reactor now can be connected to the conductors network
+ Fixed resource icons in the machine store again
+ Fixed a rare bug which was preventing finishing the game
+ Tweaked scroll speed for windows platform
+ Proper rendering of resources traveling through conductors
+ Charonite and Void surges are slightly more distinguishable from each other
+ Added a guiding arrow on the other side
+ Fixed other minor bugs

Thank you all for playing my game, and see you on the next update!

Gunlocked 1.55: One Last Hurrah

Developing Gunlocked was a life-changing event that saw me go from a 15 year career as a freelance illustrator to a full time game developer. It was both scary and fun to come back to this project for one last little update.

Playing it again had me fall in love with it all over. I'd love to make a proper sequel some day, but this game developer life is still a tenuous one, so we'll have to see how things shake out with my current project, Boons & Burdens!

Thanks for everything, and enjoy this last little patch for the 2nd Gunning DLC! And if you still don't have it, grab a copy of the 2nd Gunning DLC here

New Content for DLC owners

• New Symbionic: Parting Shot
  
• New Symbionic: Echo Maker
  
• New Symbionic: Triomnilator
  
• New Symbionic: Thunder Spark

QoL

• DLC should now work in offline mode as long as you've played the game once while online after purchase
  
• Various optimizations related to in-game events and sounds
  
• Electroline no longer says it's luck based in upgrade type
  
• Heatseeker shows more burn weapon synergies

Bug Fixes

• Tabbing out should no longer mess with the resolution
  
• Fixed a memory leak related to Ram's augment that could cause progressive slowdown in endless mode
  
• Trial scores should no longer be saving when not in a Trial game
  
• Codex should properly save and unlock the new symbionics

THANK YOU again to all of you for making our Early Access launch so amazing. Today’s hotfix is the first of many upcoming patches and updates to improve No Rest for the Wicked on the road to our 1.0 release.

We hear you! While we are hard at work on performance improvements and controller remapping, which are coming soon, please be sure to check the resolution settings for the game to be able to get the best experience in the meantime.

Today’s Day 2 hotfix aims to improve balance, durability, stamina, loot, stability, and immediate quality of life:

⚔️ Balance Changes:

• Reduced Durability Damage Taken
  
• Reduced Repair Costs
  
• Increased Drop Rate on Repair Powders
  
• Reduced Stamina Costs
  
• Reduced Fall Damage Curve
  
• Reduced cost of Horseshoe Crab and food that includes Horseshoe Crab
  
• Balance update for the Cerim Crucible boss
  
• Changed Corpse-Smeared Blade starting from Tier 2 to Tier 1

⚔️ Loot Changes:

• Introduced more Weapons into Fillmore's Pre-Sacrament Loot Table
  
• Reduced Drop Rate of Fallen Embers

⚔️ Stability:

• Fixed crash that could occur when quitting out to the main menu

⚔️ Bug Fixes:

• Improved inventory navigation
  
• Fixed jump at Potion Seller Cave so you can’t miss the jump when executed correctly
  
• Blocked off an out of bounds area of Nameless Pass
  
• Removed lingering dev tools

To give feedback and report bugs, please head on over to our No Rest for the Wicked forum!