Hello everyone!

The dust has settled after our participation and GameOn. We have wrapped up improvements we made for the expo in this update.

One of features of this update is an important one for all new-coming players. We need to have as good as possible first impression, so we have re-done the tutorial level. Tutorial steps have now been laid out in a less "conceptually challenging" order. It now starts with basic movement teachings which leads to growing a single zooid and using Dash skill. Then player is blocked by a rock which requires using combat skills and ends with telling how to modify your Sipho layout. Still, the tutorial is not ideal as we have seen with our eyes. Expo players have shown difficulty finding out how to grow their Sipho and some dialog-popups are still heavy with text. We will be continuing to improve it in future versions.

To ease post-tutorial playthroughs, we now also spawn your Sipho with pre-made layouts. Starting layouts are uniquely designed for each breed taking starting nutrition and how breed movement works into account. We hope this will help aligning new players with how we expect the game to be played - no more growing 5 structures in your first playthrough. Although that should still remain a possibility and would be fun to explore. Either way, as a consequence, this change will speed-up replays for veterans making zooids pre-grown.

In past few months we had reports of mysterious few second freezes of the game which would end with player Sipho being damaged. We believe we have found the culprit of said freezes and have attempted to fix the issue. It was a specific case of quadratic soft-body solver used only on player Sipho for extra detail. The detail was too subtle to risk numerical instability so we have improved general linear solution and now apply it on player Sipho as we do on any other Sipho. In addition to that, we have also added a bit more event logging of the game. If you ever encounter any kind of game mishap - please let us know in Bug Reports thread and upload your player log. We want you to have as much fun as possible!

And the ethereal changenotes, giving a glimpse into our development, are listed below:

Version 0.5.4

• Report when siphos are created and killed
• Don't log achievement unlocked when it has been already unlocked
• Hide tutorial text when skipping tutorial
• Cleanup deformable and fix teleporting old position when last remaining zooid is removed
• Add TIC to credits for supporting our discord server
• Fix having multiple cursor controllers spawned when going in and out of gameplay
• Do not track player sipho with sonar
• Limit sonar indicator size to 2x canvas size.
• Make deformable more robust and decrease physics drag to compensate movement penalty
• Use only linear soft body matching for all siphos
• Fix zooids getting disconnected when repositioned in growth after game load
• Always use linear soft body solver instead of quadratic
• Do not allow NaN propagation in Deformable code
• Add more debug options to physics menu
• Add physics development menu
• Added some logging for player death related happenings
• Added a logging helper class for all kinds of logging
• Move meshes to mesh folder
• Fix one rock in tutorial
• Display controller-relevant tooltip when ungrowing zooids
• Color zooids red when in ungrow mode with controller
• Tweak xbox controller icon sizes
• Make tutorial blips show controller related help
• Add movement help dialog image
• Have camera zoomed out a bit more by default
• Make tutorial dialog text input agnostic
• Append all layout loading messages to a single message
• Simplify combat zooid task text
• Stop rotating the player if the right stick is released
• Increase skill binding text size
• Increase global TMP xbox image scale
• Don't glow growth ui elements if we're not growing
• Make tutorial prettier
• Fix sipho icons TMP asset not being properly set up
• Show correct dialogs and fix flow of tutorial
• Fix off-by-one error in growth
• Add callback to Interactive Area when it is entered
• Add right trigger to default gamepad skill binds
• Change Tutorial to require growing Movement zooid instead of structure
• Add currents to force player to grow a movement zooid in Tutorial
• Spice up the presentation power user
• Fix whirlpool help text color
• Ungrow any zooids when entering tutorial
• Directly return UIModule stack instance in BuildUIManager
• Use TextMeshPro to render tutorial blips
• Remove in-tutorial movement type change
• Start game with predefined layouts