Greetings!

While playtesting new zooids I came up with a nice combo utilising upcoming Flail and Greaser zooids:

As it is with Flail, Greaser's graphics are still being made. We borrowed very old sprite that was used in very early versions of Sipho as a placeholder. Greaser is a passive Utility zooid which "greases up" nearby zooids and increases their range and movement power. In this case it means that buffed Grabber will have an increased distance. Same would be with any zooid that has concept of range - Spike, Claw, Flak, Leech and others. We think that this zooid should give more strategic choices in choosing between more of the same or less, but more potent. A total of four new zooids are coming in the next major 0.5.0 update.

Progressing in Sipho world means that the world changes together with you. Discovering new zooids will mean that future enemies might have them discovered too. Existing layouts for enemies now have a chance to mutate and grow discovered zooids instead of base breed ones. We think that make encounters more interesting and add slight flavour of variety.

More changes have been done in preparation for upcoming zooids. Check out full list below:

Version 0.4.8

• Fix Sipho not being stiffened when entering growth mode with only head zooid
• Stub implementation for confirming a zooid to grow for SelectZooidToGrow
• Add a SelectZooidToGrow UI module which is responsible for enabling UI navigation for zooid UI elements
• Add UIModules which should be used for handling various UI-related tasks, one at a time
• Disable automatic UI navigation for sipho name field
• Make Cra'than boss spawn minion immidiatelly after being damaged
• Make environment spike lighter, but have more drag
• Don't undeform Sipho when it's being grown/modified
• Remove buffs from zooid when it's dying to prevent destroying nested effects
• Remove stats from poison debuff so they don't show up in tooltips
• Make Greaser have no energy upkeep
• Add and use Flail material
• Optimize growth mode UI layout
• Stiffen player Sipho when entering growth mode
• Do not lerp fixed delta time when pausing game
• Update growth transition time in Fixed Update as well as in Update
• Only mutate enemy inventories with adapted zooids, so the player would have a better idea of what to expect from them
• Ignore flail chain link collisions with flail zooid collider which helps links not getting stuck on launch
• Make flail chain link distance approximate to range as close as possible
• Add poolable joint link object to use for Flail joint chain
• Ping all breed unlock achievements when initializing the campaign achievements, in case some were unlocked without steam
• Enemies have a 20% chance to mutate one of their zooids in their inventory to some different zooid
• Don't try to mutate zooids that shouldn't be mutated
• If vagorian spawners lack layouts, just use random
• Attempt to fix zooid prefabs becoming dirty in project
• Disable connecting joints when flail is retracting and use another joint to retract it. Use LineRenderer to render connections
• Increase physics iteration count to make joints more stable
• Set up flail connection as a chain of joints