Phobos Down 0.0.7 alpha released
It's time for another Phobos Down alpha update!
Once again there is a long list of bug fixes and improvements. Probably the most visible additions is the glowing waving "trees". In practice, they are just simple static obstacles but they bring some much needed variation and more dynamic lights to the mission sites.
Another small but important visual change is that the player now turns into the direction of movement while not aiming instead of walking backwards long distances and looking stupid.
The character controller has received a lot of improvements. Walking up steep hills should now finally be smooth. This applies to the player and especially to the larger enemy types.
While there are no new enemy types added this time, I have made some changes to the existing ones. Relative enemy appearance frequencies have all been adjusted and fixes made so that the rare enemy types actually appear as infrequently as intended. One bigger change here is that the "spawner" enemy (the floating egg-like thing that spawns other enemies) has been turned into a rare special enemy type that appears at most once per wave. I did this because multiple simultaneous "spawners" were very tedious to fight and made the mission last way longer than intended.
As for new content, I have added stun projectile modifier that makes a weapon stun enemies for a while. There is also a stun device drop pod that can be used to stun a large number of enemies within range. The stunned enemies are then an easy source of kill streak or multi-kill score rewards. Stun projectiles make hitting fast-moving enemies a lot easier.
Here is the full change log since version 0.0.6:
- Fixed blast waves not affecting gibs and smoke particles.
- Added glowing trees as obstacles and additional dynamic lights.
- Made plants and trees sway after hit by projectiles and blast waves.
- Improved explosive plant model and vertex animation.
- Fixed a couple of worst (CPU) performance bottlenecks.
- Limited auto-aim to a reasonable range.
- Prevented explosive enemies from exploding until fully unburrowed.
- Add blinking light to triggered devices.
- Fixed enemies getting stuck to friendly obstacles while wandering idle.
- Increased explosive plant damage to the enemies and lowered the damage to the player.
- Lowered container explosion damage to the player.
- Removed the option to manually enter game seed.
- Fixed containers sometimes getting placed too close to the player start point.
- Turn player slowly towards walking direction while not aiming.
- Dim existing modifier icon while installing a new one to indicate that it will be replaced.
- Fixed wrong colors in explosive plant damage range indicators.
- Added explosion damage range indicator to badly damaged containers.
- Added move sound loop to crawler enemies.
- Show player health bar temporarily after closing weapon wheel.
- Properly disable player UI and controls behind mission completion info dialog.
- Always spawn score items above the ground even if the dead enemy was burrowed.
- Play a sound on equipment level upgrade at mission end.
- Fixed score label changing position with long message texts.
- Properly hide challenge/game status in main menu after game completion.
- Fixed enemy randomization to properly respect set enemy type specific probabilities.
- Rewrote the character controller to better handle climbing steep slopes.
- Fixed enemies not respecting their type specific avoidance distances.
- Smoothly turn enemies to align with ground.
- Fixed enemies forgetting their targets even if getting shot at.
- Fixed a crash when drop pods are spawned after the player's death.
- Made the lower enemy rotation speed limits actually work.
- Added projectile stun weapon modifier.
- Fixed digger enemies sliding down slopes.
- Added stun device drop pod.
- Reduced the mission count range to 6-9 (from 8-12).
- Fixed completely broken rotation handling in all particle systems.
- Fixed walker leg damage flash being one frame late compared to its body.
- Turned spawner enemies into rarely seen "special" enemies.
You can contact me through the contact form here or leave a comment on Itch.io page.
Downloads are available on Itch.io:
Posted on 2024-05-06