We can finally say that the latest version 0.7.8 is a direct improvement over previously available Sipho version 0.6.9 and time has come to make it available for everyone! There are loads of new content and tweaks in this update:

New and higher resolution graphics for all environments. Deeper objects are now affected by parallax effect. Some of new objects have special properties - Bones spawned in Advena areas are breakable, Cra'Than Holes spawn food if they are unblocked. And all of these environments are no longer visited in fixed order - this improves replayability and allows us present more varied enemies. Previously, Saenus Beefuorus were only seen in first levels and they barely fought back. Now, you might encounter them in later giving a much better fighting chance for that breed.

Sea creature in its comfy coral-decorated environment waiting to snip you

9 new bosses were added for each difficulty tier, adding up to a total of 13. Some of boss designs were based on the winners of community boss design competition. Boss fight arenas also use new environment features to spice up the strategy. We will be further polishing these fights - we want to these fights to encourage varied strategies and break pace from regular open-area battles. Boss fights are also great for experimenting with different mechanics in isolated area which we might bring later to the rest of the game.

One of new Advena breed bosses found in Level 3 "Secondary Crater"

Extended connections for structure parts was a small change which unlocked exponentially more possibilities of designing your SIpho. It was once a cursed growth technique of experienced players, which required placing and removing structure Zooids in a specific way to create farther connections than usually possible. Thanks to our community, it has been implemented to work out of the box:

Here you can see Advena structures placed further apart to allow Spikes sliding through

Special properties for movement Zooids were added to differentiate movement zooids further. They have the following effects:

• Advena  movers regenerate energy on hit - we hope that this will play well with Advena's aggressive idea
  
• Saenus  movers have much stronger Dash skill effect - acting like real-life squid jets
  
• Buginis  movers decrease cooldowns of neighboring zooids by 10% - plays well with Buginis skill
  oriented breed. Since skills are not separated for each zooid and connections can be more intricate, mean value for cooldowns is used. For example if you have a Flak with 110% Cooldown Recovery and another with 120% CR, skill cooldown will be reduced by 15%.
  
• Cra'Than  movers have additional connection points - crazy, we know, let's see how this works!
  
• Vagorian  movers regenerate health - destined to bump into spiky things, Vagorians have evolved to regenerate their wounds,
  

Improvements worth mentioning:

• Rebalanced energy use of skills  to scale better with smaller and larger Siphos.
  
• Added new Cooldown Recovery stat which improves your Skill cooldown duration
  
• New type of Siphonophore enemy - Polyp , which are stationary, turret-like Siphos. They don't think much and certainly don't move. Currently they can be found in single boss fight and spawned in Aquarium. In future versions we might use them as enemies in regular areas as well as in different boss fights.
  
• Zooid unlock drop options increase with each level  - first boss drops two zooids to choose from, second one drops three and so forth - we hope this gives more freedom and incentive to continue playing in further levels.
  
• You now keep all adapted Zooids throughout runs. It means that with every replay extra Zooid selection list grows with new zooids. We thought that previous behaviour was just unpleasant for inexperienced players and nothing of value for experienced ones.
  
• New powerups - Melee and Ranged Damage, Cooldown Recovery and Range
  

Known issue:

• With increased amount of environment objects performance can get worse once Area is Cleared . We are looking into how to improve both performance and experience of being told that the level has ended.
  

All of changes made since 0.6.9 can be found here.