Greetings!

The long awaited 4 new zooids are here:

• The slimy thought-provoking Greaser which buffs neighbouring zooids with range and movement power. It creates an interesting choice between having one, but powerful zooid or many of the same zooid.
• The shaky concept-bending Swarmer which spawns little critters that attack their foes and damage everything in their way. It challenges the regular approach to combat by allowing to keep a long distance from enemies but at less direct control of damage.
• The swingy motion-dependent Flail which damages everything it touches with its spiky ball loosely connected to the colony. Flail use highly depends on your movement skills as it needs to be flung around at great speeds. It also acts as a good shield.
• The hasty projectile-emitting Sprayer which spews out little projectiles and can hurt by touch as well. Sprayer requires high energy efficiency of the colony and good aim.

We are happy to bring these crazy ideas as breedless zooids. You will be able to adapt them from bosses the same way as Ancient ones (Grappler, Sniper, Muck and Energy Leech). We are looking into ways of making that less random. This wasn't a problem when we had less zooids, but now that we have more, we will look into making obtaining zooids more of a choice rather than a lottery.

And the final changes that brought us here are listed below:

Version 0.5.0

• Increase Swarmer max critter count to 3 and nutrition cost to 6
• Make swarmer icon power-of-two size to not be stretched in UI
• Tweak greaser effect
• Add angular drag to the tip of Flail to limit it's spinning after getting into twister
• Clean up Zooid shader Properties and make Dissolve optional
• Move the 4 new zooids out of development and into the game!
• Swarmer is now a combat zooid
• Tweak greaser effect to resemble a coat of blue jelly
• Expose edge detection power parameter and Zooid shader blend parameters
• Add environment spikes to Frakir boss arena
• Add environment spikes to Cra'than boss arena
• Make checkboxes have a checkmark when checked
• Make swarmer minions spread out when skill is activated without a target
• Kill swarmer minions if they are 2x further than range
• Expose Zooid Graphics Transform and make connectors follow it
• Shake Swarmer on skill use
• Add some maracas for the swarmer
• Update the descriptions of the new zooids and skills and change some of their placement sounds
• Add a very rough GrowZooid UI module (still needs a lot of work, pooling, caching and all the good stuff)
• Add a placeholder GrowthPointUI
• Cleaned up some UI GameParameters. Added a possibleGrowthLocationMarkerUI GameParam
• GrowthPoint positions are offset according to the target radius (no longer on the edge of the zooid)
• Blueprint no longer exposes key/value dictionary for possible growth points. Instead use GetPossibleGrowthPoints(Zooid targetZooid)
• Swarmer tweaks
• Swarmer spawn effect
• Flail tweaks and smaller slot graphics
• Different swarmer spawn effect
• Use Flail base sprite
• Change color of swarmer top instead of scaling it
• New sprite metas
• Flail base and hive alpha sprites