Hi everybody!

Hot summer has hit us HARD. It may have been the heat or your feedback that encouraged us to do some drastic changes to how Zooid food consumption works. We present you a change nobody has asked for, but deep in their heart knew they needed - all Zooids can eat food! The minigame of having consumables stuck between Zooids was frustrating. And floaty underwater movement didn't help at all. In future, we will be balancing Consumption Zooid to be notable citizens of your colonies without having to rely on basic the need of feed.

Another design thing we're battling with is growing a bunch of same type Zooids and not having to play the puzzle of Sipho - looking for synergies between parts and exploiting that. We're going to encourage the former by applying growth tax per Zooid rather than for whole Sipho. And the tax will also be fully returned if you ungrow a healthy Zooid - all for experimentation and encouraging your creativity.

Big UI overhaul has delayed this update. Apparently getting all fonts and layouts right is not an easy or fast task. We've added extra effort to align all labels in game precisely so they are always pleasant to look at. Please let us know if we missed any misaligned pixels, or anything, really, it's a development alpha demo after all!

Let's look at the beautiful list of changes.

Major Changes:

• All Zooids have learned to provide for the colony and can now eat the delicious&nutritious food pellets. Eater Zooids are better at pulling food closer
• Ungrowing Zooids returns full spent value
• Levels are now ended with huge environmental collapse, leaving no one behind
• Updated Menu graphics and fonts
• Each Zooid is priced separately, encouraging more diverse builds

Minor Changes:

• Reset scale when de-pooling poolable
• Parent spike weapon connection in appropriate place
• Forceful whirlpool improvements
• Destroy particle emitters on level end gracefully
• Poison kills dead zooids if they both don't have an owner
• Instantly despawn environment objects if they get pulled in outside view range
• Tweak level end whirlpool spawning
• Sink powerups too
• Start taxing individual zooids right away instead of waiting until you have at least 3 of one paticular type
• Crabs boss no longer has 50 nutrition and will no longer regrow it's claws 10 times
• Unhighlight skill zooids when swapping skills
• Fixed an issue where leech graphics would appear on top of effects
• Flak now shoots weaker projectiles from the sides that only deal 1 damage
• Flak also plays sounds when picked up&dropped. Updated flak skill description.
• Sink enemies instead of killing them. Decompose dead zooids when sinking
• Handle sinking for consumables gracefully
• Tweak alien area
• Fix graphics connector offset
• Fix spike weapon connector offset
• Highlight zooids that will be dragged
• Return full zooid value when ungrowing and include Zooid Tax in Wealth
• Make Underwater boss a little bit slower in movement and vicinity attacks
• This is a meta commit
• Implemented new button graphics for the menus
• Update Camera Follow custom view even when there's no target main sipho
• Add _UnscaledTime animated shader property for paused menu animations
• Make Main Menu look a little bit better and apply appropriate PostFX to heads
• Use proper teleport to avoid mangling up head selection siphos
• Add Relative twin stick movement setting
• Hide Dive button in growth mode
• Add nutrition when skipping tutorial
• Dive to whirlpools slower automatically and faster by buttons
• Set Zooid price growth to 30%
• Return some lost nutrition after boss battle
• Fix single headed enemies not turning correctly
• Reworked main menu layout to be left-handed and more column-y
• Increased main menu button spacing
• Buttons only glow when mouse is over them and they now have a neat orange color
• Sipho title enlarged
• Tweaked credits
• Reworked head selection UI
• Make Alien boss not a total placeholder wimp
• Tweak main menu and add references to breed selection buttons
• Add scaling support to labels
• Scale options label
• Update zooid description format for new font
• Head selection tweaks
• Prefabify orange button. Use it for dialog. Update gameplay UI fonts
• Limit main menu button size
• Gameplay UI tweaks
• All Zooids can eat