Greetings!

The dust has settled after 0.5.0 release and we are so far happy with reception of it. We had players stream their progress in our Discord server, chat about their Zooid hunting experience. This was a heartwarming experience. Let us know what you think of the new Zooids!

As our Zooid roster grows more luck is required to get a part drop you wish. We are thinking of ways fixing that and for now, we implemented one simple thing that was suggested by a community member. It is that Frakir will now prioritise dropping parts that you have not yet discovered. This will work as an encouragement to beat the game for more experienced players and will not affect the flow of the rest of the game as it is the end boss. This will guarantee that after beating game finite number of times you will discover all available parts.

We have an opportunity to participate in local gaming conference for which we need to do some preparations. To get a good playtesting feedback from attendees we need to have a solid new-player-experience, otherwise new player will be stuck on issues we already know and won't be able to provide deeper insight of the game. That means we will be reworking tutorial level and finishing full controller support. These goals align well with our development plans as both tutorial and controller support are needed for a full game. We will share more details about participating in the conference once we really know we have been accepted to showcase Sipho.

We have already started on controller support improvements in a separate branch, which means that some of the work won't be visible in the changelog until it gets to the main development branch:

Version 0.5.1

• Award undiscovered zooid after killing Frakir
• Fix Frakir becoming invincible again after growing back a zooid
• Fix game not being unmuted when going back to main menu
• Make scrolling textures blend options use unity enums instead of hardcoded values
• Update material assets to include used shader keywords
• Add debug option to teleport things to center of the screen
• Make claws appear below zooids so they look better when oversized
• Update preloaded shader variants to include zooid dissolve shader keyword
• If the longterm progress can't be parsed from json, assume that it's corrupted and start over
• If game save can't parse the file from json, assume there is no game save instead of throwing out an exception
• Make game save, progression and game file reading and parsing a bit more robust.
• Update the swarmer shake sound to loop better