Hello!

It's been around two months since our last update. We have been thinking about our core values of the game and how it should play. To promote creativity we have implemented ability to change your Siphonophore's shape without ungrowing zooids! Simply drag and drop built zooids in growth mode. If target location is acceptable and game doesn't detect any overlaps, zooids will be moved. Otherwise they will return to their original position. Please note that there are still some overlap issues unrelated to drag-and-drop functionality and it may not be as smooth as we would like it to be.

We also started to transition from this project as a "toy" concept, where there is no win/lose state, no progression, to a "game" - we tweaked some level difficulties and started working on level layout we thing should be in the final game. Currently some things are quite abrupt - enemies just stop spawning and whirlpools appear everywhere once you reach a certain progression level. In future, we want to make it seamless and more tied with lore.

Have fun!

Major Changes:

• Allow re-positioning already grown zooids without needing to ungrow them
• Make level progression linear. Track player progression in various ways and adapt environment to it
• Only Heads drop food

Minor Changes:

• Remove toggle ungrow button
• Added a movement skill type. Enemies now use movement skills when too far away from their targets
• Heal now costs 75 energy
• Dash costs 30 energy instead of 20
• Added a zooid UI overlay that displays the current zooid health
• Drag and drop magic. Now rotates to correct positions and doesn't die. No overlaps allowed
• Fix spontaneus zooid deaths
• Do not consider connectivity of graph with two non-structure zooids
• Block when growing on self or others
• Add force to mine explosion
• Don't play squirt sound when building alien movers
• Fix main menu link mess
• Clamp crazy movement values to fix mover visuals
• Make mine explodable with bullets
• Add random time offset for mine lifetime
• Arrow keys to change selected head. Don't allow to change selected head while in start animation
• Add support for arbitrary connection angles
• Hold shift to ungrow
• Add tooltips to zooids
• Level starts spawning massive amounts of whirlpools after two minutes and stops any other spawning
• Add piercing limit to spike
• Show ungrow value
• Tweak spawner settings
• Make leech skill continous
• Update leech skill description
• Most zooids now have a singular connection point
• AI: Do not use skills while wandering
• Add a little friendly guy to tutorial scene to murder
• Make passive enemies really passive
• Make bosses super aggressive
• Add some force to claw bites
• Show health bars on heal and fade them out more quickly
• Boss battle now starts with you in a tunnel looking at the boss spawning in the distance
• Progress can now scale from zooid kills, nutrition collected and time
• Added zooid food drop ratio parameters. Only heads now drop food.
• Add debug progress slider
• Make leech pull cheaper
• Remove ridiculous square bug boss
• Game saved after loading next area
• Nicer head selection camera
• All fighting zooids now do twice the damage, making combat faster and more decisive
• Don't spawn enemies into walls
• Add flash to food eaten effect
• Add food pickup animation to heads
• Add audio to leech slurps
• Improve food pickup effect
• Spawn enemies more dynamically. Move progress manager to DifficultySettings
• Center text now fades out regardless of the timescale
• Underwater scenes now linearly follow each other
• Added new blueprints for Azure Depths
• Added new blueprints for Humming Reefs
• Reduced spawn distance in the underwater levels so you see the first enemies a bit faster, but still have some breathing space
• Made corals bigger
• Make graphics connect nicely
• Spike is now connected via line renderer instead of floating
• Bumped enemy bonus nutrition in first two levels
• Greatly reduced food spawn in the first two levels
• Increased zooid nutrition capacity
• Flak projectile is a lot faster so it's possible to finish enemies off
• Plant level food spawn reduced
• Plant levels also want the player to collect 10 nutrition before progressing further.
• New plant boss battle scene
• Linearized plant game scenes
• Cancel growing with ESC
• Enter key enters whirlpool
• Preload some used shaders
• Added a TimeMaster that can track pauses coming from different elements. Dialogs now pause the game.
• Boss will not respawn after loading a bossfight level where the boss was already killed
• Tutorial text now bounces a bit when appearing
• Renamed blueprint storage folders to level1/2 etc.
• Added some new level3 bug blueprints
• Increased the nutrition gain on level4
• Don't spawn rocks onto enemies
• Added some blueprints for level4
• Added a new boss for the plant levels
• Bug boss has bigger energy regen to be a tougher enemy
• Don't spew blood on decay
• Add a bunch of joints for dead siphos
• Fix eaters continuing to pull food while dead
• Juicify zooid kills
• Make enemy target position persistent
• Add sound to zooid explosion
• Fix some zooids staying highlit after ungrowing
• Fix chain building logic so it doesn't re-enable growth elements which play their sound
• Improve player food pickup sound
• Add generic food pickup sound
• Make food eaten sound brighter
• Leech also heals. Lower leech pull force
• Added experimental big guy spawning
• Destructible rock now has some delicious sounds
• Make leech weapon select closest victim instead of annoying random
• Add slomo FX on kills
• Icrease width of movement loop stereo
• Add reverb to movement loop
• Globally disable doppler effect which caused whirlpools to sound like airplanes
• Tweak swimming sound
• Increase whirlpool audio distance
• Add free-roam scene so game won't loop around on completion
• Add support for dialog without icon
• Add disclaimer dialog to Freeroam area
• Fix supersonic heads
• Make shader compile
• Add basic layout to Bone boss level
• Disable tonemapping for WebGL postprocess
• Don't insta-end boss battles
• Add large spike which can't be pushed around and ow, it still hurts!
• Add alien boss battle scene which is made of spikes