Hello everyone!

Another month has passed and we feel like we can not let our last version of the game circulate in the world. So many eye-pleasant things have been added to Sipho - new sprites for most of the breeds, new effects and overall visual polish. We are approaching our mental deadline and trying to focus on things that should end up in the final game. Thus, a meta-progression system has been added. This will lock down breeds other than Alien and will be unlockable through killing bosses. Do not worry, as unlocking a breed will be quick enough - three kills of appropriate boss. We want to see how this progression feels in overall game and might tweak gains in the future. Since there is some attention drawn to bosses, first Sea boss has been scripted. It should be an easy encounter and even easier once one learns its patterns. And for hardcore players - movement Zooids have been differentiated by their abilities to move in one direction or many. This should encourage growing in different directions per breed to fully utilize your movers.

See a pleasantly long and raw change log below. 

Major Changes:

• Graphical improvements: New graphics for Alien, Sea and Bug breeds. Zooids are connected through tubes. Pusher effect reworked.
• Breeds except Alien are now locked behind DNA progression system. Defeat bosses to unlock their breeds!
• Eaters and Structure zooids add Energy stats
• Slight performance improvements.
• Scripted Sea boss.
• Movers are now different by how they add their movement forces. Sea movers move quickier but in one direction, Alien movers are slow and omnidirectional. Bug movers are in between and Bone movers are good at moving sideways.

Minor Changes:

• Build UI tooltips now show the cost
• Removed braces from ungrow tooltips so it looks like text for humans
• Added a penalty for ungrowing damaged zooids
• Mover megachange: Use directionality!
• water parts fixed sprites
• Make obstacle avoidance a little bit smarter
• Moved poisoning to alien eater
• Fixed up poison sack audio
• Fixed an issue where a UI element would remain "active" after leaving growth mode
• Make enemies remember that they are avoiding obstacles
• New mover balance. Everything is slightly slower now. Underwater fastest, alien slowest
• Add sideways mover directionality
• Level one enemies are no longer speedy gonzalesii
• Adding a basic sipho lock display
• Move leech weapon logic updates to FixedUpdate. Increase distance at which leech disconnects. Fix how timer is calculated - it was possible to time leech clicks to save energy
• Use new sprites for aliens
• Use sprite-based connector for alien spikes
• Fix Spike graphics
• You can now progress towards unlocking a specific breed independently
• Head selection darkening now determined by whether you've unlocked the breed or not
• Bosses now give progress towards unlocking their own breed
• Head selection UI rework
• Tweaked head selection UI and reworked alien text info
• You can no longer start the game with a locked breed. Let the game begin.
• Webgl saving now unified under gamesave. Longterm progress should now get saved on webgl
• Distribute movement power to neighbor zooids if movement zooid is in center of mass
• Make food less spinny
• Do not connect to more than one zooid with non-structure zooids
• Highlight structure zooids when zooids are being dragged and aren't close enough
• Don't update velocity of deformable if timestep is very small
• Head selection scene shows progress for unlocking a breed
• Increased the time range on which velocity updates should still happen
• Fix jumping / rotating zooids when growing
• Quick copypasta remolval for zooid descriptions
• Added new pickup and plonk sounds for underwater and bone zooids
• Meta progress is now rewarded via consumable
• Show text on the bottom of the screen when making progress
• Head selection now names DNA as a currency of progress
• Structure gives a bit of energy capacity, Eaters give a bit of energy regeneration
• Zooid description formatter now mentions energy stat bonuses
• DNA progress now shown as a bar in-game
• Add factions for AI target differentiation
• Fully fix deformable flipping out
• Make enemies very angry at the end of the level
• Make faster enemies try to flank their victim if they are far enough
• Use smoothdamp for animating the progress bar
• Don't show progress UI when the bar would be full
• Display the number of collected DNA on the progress bar
• Display icon of the current breed that you're trying to unlock when showing the progress bar
• Use unscaled time
• A little bit more verbal skill method naming
• Enemies use one skill and shuffle it instead of using all at once
• Fix enemy skill usage
• Fix that some blueprints were never used
• Moved Wealth and MaxWealth to SiphoStatistics
• Game is now progressed via wealth
• Redid mover descriptions
• Fix leeches not leeching on fast food and make them not error-out when killing destructible rocks
• Allow destroying destructable obstacles by hitting them
• Make mine explosion non-square and reduce its power
• Make dense whirlpools spawn everywhere and make them non-overlapping
• Add mode residual substance to mine explosion FX
• Tweaks to mine explosion effect
• Different kind of pulse before mine explosion
• Make first level have less enemies and no big guys for easier start
• Move growth background out of player prefab so one could easily focus it in scene
• Override mover directions in Head + Mover combo
• Added some bone/level5 blueprints
• Use new Sea sprites
• Fix solids layer mask combining
• Make claw damage all solids
• Don't stop spawning environment stuff after level ends. Stop spawning only food and powerups
• Make whole mine expand not just graphics
• Build UI resets targetState when disabled (fixes new game pause failure)
• Main menu panel is on top of the game UI and not the bottom
• Main menu now pauses the game and can be toggled by the button that opens the menu
• Add post process profiles for each environment
• Slow down head if its the only zooid
• Fix tank strafe and relax target angle when not moving
• Don't make destructible rock appear below environment rocks
• Increase spike resting distance. This might fix glitching out
• Make background parallax more pronounced
• Tweak deep object looks. Enable deep plants
• Make underwater levels less spacious
• Don't try to apply extra force on spawned objects. Improve spawner UI
• More pronounced water mover moving animations
• Add decorations to boss fight zone
• Add another underwater boss blueprint
• Deinstantiate some of the poolables on level end so they don't appear in the next level
• Consumables are now pooled and despawned on scene end
• Progress pickups should also get deinstantiated on level end
• Grid spawner can now spawn poolables as well
• And grid spawner now correctly adds poolables back into their pools once it unloads
• Add basic smart AI for Underwater boss
• Underwater boss tweaks
• Polish pushers
• Make crabs boss non-cheating with energy
• Whirlpools are now poolable in a pool. Whirl.
• Fix alien structure sprite fading
• Give underwater boss some nutrition
• Piss poor attempt to improve spawn effect
• Currents should be Ignored by raycasts
• New bug head
• Use rest of the Bug sprites
• Improve Bug mover graphics
• projectile sprite for bug wep
• Make underwater boss push projectiles away
• Water ripples are now a following effect
• Game is now called "Sipho" and is made by "All Parts Connected"
• Make critter make ripplies instead of using trails
• Update flak projectile
• Add zooid connector to bug breed
• Bump nutrition requirements in scenes after boss fights
• Do not emit following effect particles when objects are teleported
• Add link to our website and steam page in main menu
• Add alpha version ribbon
• Add subscribe text to main menu