Hello everyone!

In the past month we have been preparing Sipho for its first showcasing in our local fantasy conference Lituanicon, where we have been invited to let attendees sit down and play our game. Preparations were simple - just make game, like we have always tried with each demo build we publish.

Some development focus has been on bosses, which this build includes two new bosses to tackle. Good game feel, which we hope has been increased by making dead Zooids drop health pickups and making structure Zooids less draggy, which should encourage interesting builds. And most noticeable feature is steps in making UI little bit more presentable. This has shown to be difficult two get right from the first time - some things may look nice in detail, but once placed next to other beautiful sprites becomes a visual clutter, stealing focus from important gameplay information. UI is going to be a thing that will surely change more. It's like designing looks for a separate game, which itself should tell a story, but not obstruct the real game.

See a pleasantly long and raw change log below:

Major Changes:

• Structure Zooids have less drag. This encourages growing larger, more complex creatures.
• New gameplay UI which is less vertically obstructive
• Dead Zooids drop health pickups for more exciting gameplay
• Whirlpools spawned at the end of the level are forceful and drag player in
• Bug and Bone breed bosses

Minor Changes:

• Shell now lasts for 15 seconds and its cooldown is 30 seconds
• Reduced claw cost to 6
• Added a shell destroy effect to indicate when it protected you
• Optimize eater performance by not using colliders to check for food, but raycasting
• When growing zooids, do not save new positions as deformed
• Don't change scale of live zooids. Fixes spike flipping out
• Don't give progress if an enemy eats the progress consumable
• All enemies drop DNA on death
• Make spike head collider even small to prevent getting stuck in siphos
• Use new bone sprites. Except for mover and leech animation needs tweaking
• Fixup sprite pivot offset when drawing outline
• Make only food containers damageable through collisions
• Update Bone Mover graphics
• Bone breed Zooid size tweaks
• Make rocks easier to destroy by hitting
• Make critters slower and not so annoying to catch
• Damp tank control rotational speed if sipho is already spinning
• Try not to clump enemies together. Increase spawn distance from player. Spawn one enemy close to player on game start.
• Move rocks to default layer instead of zooid layer. No Zooid Rocks!
• Make wandering enemies a little bit slower and don't make already turning siphos turn too fast
• Make critter a little bit faster
• Make burst also a Defensive skill
• Slow down Enemy turning only if it's head only
• Tutorial can now be skipped and will automatically be skipped after completing it once
• Did a structure balance/description pass
• Fixed a bug where health bars would randomly appear after ungrowing
• Add energy regen powerup
• Update energy stats more frequently in sipho
• Consumables can restore health
• Add Healing pickup
• Zooids have a list of items to drop on decompose. Add a dropper component
• Regular enemies and bosses now have a chance to drop consumables. Bosses have a higher chance
• Shells remove stun debuff
• Make currents appear under obstacles
• Make mines more slippery
• Make enemies denser in plant and underwater levels
• Try to grow from blueprint every frame when initially growing whole blueprint
• Add new Bug boss
• Reworked progress to only go to next level when a condition is completely fulfilled instead of being a combination of conditions
• All levels can now be completed by just killing a bunch of dudes
• Don't create garbage in progress calculations
• Change order of scenes
• Control how much can volter stun
• Make bone mover animations snappier
• Don't alloc GC when calculating graph things
• Destructible object now drops powerups if it hadn't dropped food
• Eater pulls itself to food too for physical consistency
• Add grid spawner option to scale objects by noise value
• Use noise scaling for Underwater scene
• More accurate grid spawner minimum distance calculation
• Make plant level nicer
• Control tank turn sensitivity
• Don't spawn final whirlpools if they're overlapping other objects
• Prevent zooids from flying away due to mine explosions
• Improve bug boss and don't cheat energy with it
• Add deforming to environment shader
• Add animated deforming to some Bone environment objects
• Reduced bone mover omnidirectionality to 0. Slightly increased bug mover omnidirectionality 0.2 => 0.35.
• Added mover growth arrows that show the movement direction
• Initial implementation of new skill/energy/nutrition sprites
• Siphos respect their initial growth rotation
• WIP Bone boss
• Optimize Zooid Growth path
• Make deformable allocate-free
• Improve some powerup FX
• Make enemies always drop health pickups and bosses drop powerups
• Add better way of disabling spike scaling
• Remove unused colliders
• Make screen shake deterministic and don't shake in paused mode
• Support zooids of any size
• Tweak bone boss. Pre-allocate blueprint which it grows to
• Add automatic whirlpool which sucks player in forcefully
• Use UI to show forced whirlpool state
• Use new sprite for skill ui background
• Make dead zooid bits restore 10 energy for smoother dead-sipho-cleanup
• Make all structures lighter and have less drag
• Dont stop spike piercing dead zooids
• Make shell lifetimes less synchronized
• Show zooid physical values in description
• Don't repair, heal zooids
• Make whirlpools drag in food containers too
• Add splashes to forceful whirlpool
• Make containers collide with everything
• Better enemy obstacle avoidance
• Make enemies less mentally challenged
• Don't scale ghost images when scaling canvas
• Add activation range to boss fight manager. Zoom in on spawned boss sipho
• Bone bossfight improvements. Special spawner zooid added
• Use new background UI for growth menu
• Made skill background colors customizable
• Add Minion Master script and use it for minion spawner Zooid
• Don't recreate lists on every skill zooid request
• Properly limit how many minions can Bone Boss spawn. Fix erroring out on player death
• Stack based menus
• Add naive audio settings
• Made everything unlocked by default
• Save audio settings in player prefs
• GameplayUI canvas is now pixel perfecto
• Update tutorial texts
• Make underwater boss less annoying
• Use 3D scale data for UI
• Update rest of the fonts
• Add UI scaling
• More enemies in Underwater levels
• Tweak build settings: Mac default to GLCore. Add Icon. Allow resising windowed mode
• Fix zooid button scaling