Bionic Dues:Alpha Release Notes

Alpha 0.907

(Not yet released; we're still working on it!)

• The full (as opposed to the partial preview that was there before) title track for Bionic Dues, "The Home That We Once Knew," is now integrated into the game!

• Completely redid Tuck's bonus, since he was kind of useless with his other bonus:
  • Tough and resourceful, Tuck's skills at sleuthing lend him an enormous tactical advantage in missions: he can see both his objectives and the location of all terminals and loot without first exploring to them.
  • Thanks to Histidine for suggesting.

• The description of Axis has been rewritten to make it clear how powerful she is:
  • A professional scout drone pilot before she became an Exo driver, Axis has the ability to see 4 missions out on the city map instead of the usual 3. Even more importantly, she has the ability to undertake missions that are 2 away rather than the usual 1, thereby letting her skip missions at will.
  • Thanks to Histidine for inspiring a shift.

• Added text to the bottom of the missions hot tips:
  • The finishing touch to any mission is to find the Warp Pad and get your Exos out of here!
  • Thanks to Breach for suggesting.

• The health stats on all the bosses have been majorly scaled down so that they are still impressive on the last day, but not insane.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for reporting.

• The function of the whistle has been redefined a bit, so that it now alerts all enemies that you have detected which are not currently alerted, rather than those in your (invisible) sensor range. This basically makes it work like probably everyone thought it already did.

• The system stats for mines were garbled in the customization view. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Winge and nas1m for reporting.

• When Rey's fifth Exo is restored, it now comes in with full ammo and no disabled systems, unlike before. If you see anything more strange with this, please do let us know!
  • Thanks to Coppermantis for reporting.

Alpha 0.906

(Released September 10th, 2013)

• Player ammo reductions relative to 0.904 (increases from 0.905, though):
  • Laser Rifle 50 to 35.
  • Machine Gun 80 to 55.
  • Rocket Launcher 14 to 11.
  • Gamma Ray Laser 20 to 18.
  • Grenade Launcher 36 to 16.
  • Chaingun 100 to 70.
  • Shotgun 30 to 24.
  • Volatizer 20 to 17.
  • The prior changes were a bit too harsh, so this is the middle ground. Further feedback welcome!

• Fixed a bug with ClawBot where it was healing itself (!) as well as its nearby allies each turn. Wow OP.

Alpha 0.905

(Released September 10th, 2013)

• The DiamondBot and RecoilBot are now fully lit and animated.

• Fixed a bug where the DragonBot's grenade launcher stats were swapped with the player ones, making the DragonBot terrifying and the player incredibly weak.
  • Thanks to orzelek for the clue that led to this finally, after a number of people mentioned it.

• RadarBot and ShieldBot now fully lit and animated.

• You can now opt out of repeated showings of the intro briefing text and voiceover.

• Fixed a rare parts-related null reference exception.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for reporting.

• BodyBot is now fully lit and animated.

• Only Hard and Expert difficulty levels now have system damage (in the sense of a random chance from enemies), since that's a bit more complex and can be frustrating if you are still learning.

• The part attributes and parts that are specifically for system hardening and system damage prevention are also now limited to hard and expert difficulties.

• Added the new Capacitor part type, which provides another way of generating power either directly in your reactor or in your computer. Actually this isn't power generation, it's power savings, but it works out either way. See the game for details, and yes we know this only sort of makes sense if you are big into electronics. The game already makes fun of this, so you don't have to. ;)

• Updated the explosive runes a bit to be easier to use via only triggering from certain kinds of weapons. Their text has been amended as follows:
  • These runes are actually a warning label overlaid on top of sub-floor explosive equipment: so straight-shot and laser weapons won't penetrate far enough to cause any problems. Only rockets, plasma weapons, dissolver blasts, grenades, shadow torpedoes, and volatizer fire will trigger the runes.
  • Thanks to Cyborg, mrhanman, and orzelek for inspiring this change.

• Indirect shots against explosive runes now triggers them the same as direct shots do.

• Reduced the number of floor types (for now) to just the ones that are most attractive, and which have the tile-based grid.
  • The tile-based grid in turn makes the fog of war look nicer, and makes movement and attack ranges a bit clearer.
  • We will be doing more floors in the coming weeks, but we want all of them to be up to the standards of the very best ones we have already, so we cleaned house a bit.

• Invisible robots and robots that are allied with you no longer draw targeting lines at you.

• Invisible robots that are right next to an Exo now become visible no matter what. Otherwise it feels like a bug when you try to move into their tile and mysteriously cannot.

• AS AN EXPERIMENT, the game has been updated to use pessimistic line of sight rather than the more permissive shadowcasting algorithm.
  • This prevents any instances of being able to shoot around corners on the part of yourself or bots, but it is much more restrictive view-wise.
  • In the pre-alpha stages we had a lot of unpleasantness with this, but on further recollection the problem was how we were visibly modeling the LOS rather than the LOS method itself. So this may work out fine and feel more natural than the prior approach. So far that does actually see the case, but we'll see.
  • Thanks to Misery for pushing this issue.

• When enemies or tiles get shot, it now automatically alerts nearby enemies, as you would expect. So you can't shoot somebody and have the guy next to him just sit there.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• When enemies are not in fog of war, you can already tell if they are activated or not based on their animations and glows. However, when they are in fog of war that was not possible to tell until now.
  • Now enemies in fog of war that are deactivated show up darker in their wireframe view, and then they become full bright when they are activated.

• Some of the overly-alert-happy logic for enemies has been changed. It was a bit unclear, and the new alert logic handles the cases that make the most sense anyhow. It should in general feel a lot more natural now.

• Enemies which are within 7 range of you now see you when you get near. Before it was 20, which made it pretty crazy if you were a sniper.

• Updated the pathfinding for enemies enormously; it got changed away from the kind that worked so well in Skyward at some point, but now it has been reverted to that and enemies now act much more sensibly. Dangerously so.
  • There was also some funky (lack of) pathfinding around fuel tanks that has now been fixed.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting the strangeness here.

• When your weapons are disabled, it now shows them properly red and cracked on the sidebar.
  • Thanks to Cyborg and nas1m for reporting.

• Meg is now the default commander for new players, as she is easier to play with than Axis.

• Fixed an issue where the electric floors in Assassination missions could sometimes let you into loot closets without your having to unlock the door.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting.

• There is a new Warp Page (Mission Exit) tile that now seeds in all missions.
  • When all your mission objectives have been completed, stepping onto this pad will warp your Exos out and declare mission victory!
  • In other words, these are the "stairs down" if you are thinking of other roguelikes.
  • The reason for this addition is to give you more control over when exactly you win a mission (so you can explore more prior to exiting if you want).
  • In old savegames, you may find that you insta-win your current mission if the objective is simply to find the mission exit, which doesn't exist in that mission. Later missions in that same savegame won't have this effect. We figured you'd prefer this to having the mission being unwinnable. ;)
  • Thanks to mrhanman and nas1m for inspiring this change.

• Fixed the collision box on the reactor fabricator not being the right size.

• Fixed an issue where old exos were not being properly cleared out of memory, and thus all sorts of strangeness could happen including auto-won and auto-lost missions, and I'm sure more. It was also a form of memory leak. Good grief!
  • Thanks to Histidine, Aeson, and Misery for reporting.

• The trap evasion message was showing up garbled with a hex address.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for reporting.

• The laser rifle now has range 8 instead of range 6.

• Plasma Cannon now has no falloff in its damage that it does to enemies, it now has a range of 12 instead of 6, and its radius of splash damage is now 7 instead of 4.
  • This is the grandaddy of guns, and was not really feeling like it previously.

• Player ammo reductions:
  • Laser Rifle 50 to 20.
  • Machine Gun 80 to 30.
  • Rocket Launcher 14 to 7.
  • Gamma Ray Laser 20 to 18.
  • Grenade Launcher 26 to 16.
  • Chaingun 100 to 40.
  • Shotgun 30 to 18.
  • Volatizer 20 to 14.
  • The idea here is that you need to actually swap out and use more of your Exos, and ammo scarcity during missions actually feels present.
  • The prior alpha balance had been based on much larger levels (about 300% larger), and we had not scaled down the ammo to match the newer, more compact (and more fun) levels.
  • Note that the ammo for the low-ammo weapons are unchanged, so aren't shown above.

• The name for ninja exos was saying tank instead -- oops. Fixed.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for reporting.

• The portrait of Rey no longer has his text blending in so much with his shirt.
  • Thanks to Aeson for reporting.

Tutorializing

• The way that the stat lines are done at the top of the part picker screen has been reorganized somewhat so that it goes by column before going by row now. This makes the visual space look more sensible, and this plus some other changes also ready us for doing tooltips on those individual line items.

• All of the stats up at the top of the part picker screen now have tooltips that explain what each of those stats mean. This is in addition to the previously-added tooltips on the Exo stat lines on the main Exo customization screen.

• There is a new "Hot Tips" popup for the city map that shows when you first enter it (after the game start voiceover). This also has an opt-out.
  • You have 50 days. Each mission will bring you closer to the final battle.
  • Each mission has consequences that will equip your Exos or weaken the enemy in the final battle. You can take on up to 50 missions in any order, then the robots attack.

• There is a new "Hot Tips" popup for the customization screen that shows when you first enter it. This also has an opt-out.
  • You get loot from winning missions, from hacking locked doors, and from spending credits at the store on the left sidebar of the city map.
  • Customize your Exos to your play style between missions. Getting to the final battle is only half the challenge. You will need creativity in design to get there!

• There is a new "Hot Tips" popup for the missions that shows when you first enter one. This also has an opt-out.
  • A "turn" is a single action (take one step, shoot one shot, use an ability, switch Exos). After you take a turn, any activated enemies each take their turns.
  • Go slow during fights. Hang back and let your enemy come to you. Use narrow places. Use your whistle ability (left sidebar) to draw them out.
  • Switch which of your four exos is active, which gun they are using, and activate special abilities such as Stealth on the left sidebar.
  • Mouse over your objective (the mission icon on the bottom left for each level), and try to survive with the least amount of casualties. You will be rewarded!

• New tutorial-y text added on the end of the description of loot containers in tooltips:
  • Don't forget to actually go into the Exo Customization screen between missions (on the left sidebar in the city map). Creatively customizing your Exos is a huge part of surviving to the last day.

• Added the following to the description of the Assassination mission type:
  • You can locate the bosses by their bluish color on sensors, as opposed to the usual gold.
  • Thanks to Aeson for inspiring this change.

• Training Ground missions are now called Lion's Den missions to better reflect their nature. Otherwise players seemed a bit too inclined to jump into an easy-sounding mission and get killed.
  • Thanks to Aeson for suggesting.

• When you go to start a new game, it now has some hot tips there as well. Which can be opted out of.
  • All of the pictures on this screen can be clicked to change which Exos, Commander, and City you are playing with.
  • If this is your first time, feel very free to leave the defaults alone for now. It's a strong party good for new players.

Alpha 0.904

(Released September 9th, 2013)

• In the store, exo customization, and inventory windows the message log now disappears after a little while of showing like it used to (it does not hide outright since that's also where MP text chat goes).
  • Thanks to Histidine for reporting.

• The visuals of your sidebar abilities are now not disabled-looking all the time.

• Fixed a number of oddities with large objects.
  • Note that this fix will not apply to existing missions you are already in, but will affect new missions in existing savegames.
  • Fixed them not completely disappearing when destroyed.
  • Fixed them looking like they were in sensors still when they were partially in line of sight.

• Fixed a bug where shooting explosive runes was costing you extra ammo for each further rune that got triggered from it.
  • Thanks to orzelek for reporting.

• The part picker has been heavily redesigned.
  • Rather than showing partly over the exo customization screen itself, it now hides that and shows as its own thing. While the other was great, there's just no way to show all the info that needs to be shown when space is restricted that way.
  • There is now a "Return to Customization" button that lets you easily get back to the other window.
  • The tooltips on the individual items are gone again, and instead the description texts at the bottom of the screen now include all that information in much larger spaces set aside for them. The font of the stuff at the bottom has also been shifted to a more compact one so that it can actually all fit.
  • Thanks to Aeson and Tridus for various suggestions that helped lead to these changes.

• Fixed a couple of typos.
  • Thanks to Aeson, mrhanman and Histidine for reporting.

• Some of the parts that increase "all shield stats" now say "all shield-system stats" to be more clear.
  • Thanks to Tridus for inspiring this change.

• All references to "health" have been instead changed to "shields." This should make things a lot clearer.
  • Thanks to Aeson, Gemzo, Tridus, and orzelek for suggesting.

• Added another group of 8 cover object graphics.

• AmmoBot is now fully lit and animated.

• ThiefBot is now fully lit and animated.

• MantaBot is now fully lit and animated.

• RazorBot is now fully lit and animated.

• The "hover here for more stats" thing on the left side of the customization window has been replaced with a scrolling text area that gives you way more information without hovering.

• When you are viewing the exo customization screen, all of the stats for the bot as a whole now show you descriptions of what they are. So you can find out just what the heck regen and regen window are this way, etc.
  • Thanks to mrhanman and Misery for suggesting.

• The exos and city and character portraits all now have labels on them with their names.
  • Thanks to Coppermantis and Histidine for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug in the last version where the handcrafted bots were actually not even showing up in the first missions!
  • Thanks to orzelek and nas1m for reporting.

• The stats scaling for the enemies toward later days had drifted into the land of insanity, and have now been brought back down.
  • This is definitely fine for bosses, or at least more in the realm of fine. But if it seems too low for regular enemies in practice, do let us know and we can split those out.
  • Thanks to Histidine for reporting.

• The TethysBot special ability has been altered so that it only happens for at most the first 5 shots that hit her, and sometimes fewer.
  • Thanks to Histidine for inspiring this change.

• Robots should no longer shoot at player mines.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where new images being loaded would cause the startup screen to flash.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for reporting.

Alpha 0.903

(Released September 18th, 2013)

• Changed how mines/tripwires/etc do their "on stepped on" logic so they no longer fire when an entity is being put on a tile during game-load or because an exo is switching in to that tile.
  • This prevents the situation where you step on a mine with a weakened exo and the mines kill it, then immediately damage the next exo. In fact, if that resulted in the second exo's death sometimes this caused an immediate mission loss despite having more exos to switch in (not sure why).

• Baseline part stats have been bumped up four rows on the table.
  • Thanks to Misery for inspiring this change.

• The "Blockade" object type has been renamed to "False Wall" as it was confusing with the Blockade missions previously (the two have nothing to do with one another).
  • Thanks to Breach for inspiring this change.

• The default message log in the upper right corner now stays around forever, like most roguelikes.
  • Thanks to Breach for suggesting.

• The tooltips for objects and units have all been made so they appear immediately, rather than requiring you to hold left-click.
  • They have also been greatly condensed vertically so that this is no longer an issue. The information shown is the same, as is the font size, though.
  • Thanks to Misery, Tridus, and others for suggesting.

• Blockade missions now have half as many enemies as before, as they are supposed to be exceptionally easy.
  • Thanks to Breach for inspiring this change.

• The amount of buffer zone between yourself and enemies at the start of the game has been increased from 6 tiles to 10. This should prevent all cases where enemies immediately have firing lines on you right at the start of a mission.
  • Thanks to Breach for inspiring this change.

• Several part stats now have non-scaling bases to bump up their initial values. So +attack now starts at 12% instead of 2%, but the scaling up for higher-level items is only applied to the original 2%, etc.
  • Thanks to Misery for inspiring this change.

• Mines can now be blown up by players shooting them, but the mines also now have more health so that you can't just one-shot them with your pistol or something.
  • Thanks to orzelek for reminding us that this was not working properly.

• The way that the attack overlays show over top of multi-tile objects is now much better, working like you would expect now.

• Grenade launcher base damage is now 400 instead of 300.
  • Thanks to madcow and Coppermantis for suggesting.

• Stealth is no longer hard-locked into the first ability slot on your ability bar (which was making it look broken if you took it off).
  • Thanks to Breach for reporting.

Alpha 0.902

(Released September 8th, 2013)

• Fixed a display bug where the amount of power generated by an auxiliary reactor or whatever would display as 4000 instead of 40, etc. FWIW it was counting correctly in the stats.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the part effect that gave a +% to attack power of all your exos weapons was... well, giving you a whole lot more than it said it would.
  • Thanks to Misery for the report.

• Fixed a bug where your using the Minelayer would actually deploy a... well, a computer terminal. There was an accident involving testing code. And then an accident involving the programmer.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for the report.

• Improved the sentry turret placement tooltip to say:
  • Left-click to place a sentry turret in front of you. If you don't like what direction you are facing, you can use the arrow keys to change your facing without actually moving.
  • Also updated the description for mines and virus similarly.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• Toggling stealth is now an inherently stealth action, meaning that enemies don't get to fire on your when you go into or come out of stealth.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• The range on the laser rifle of the players has been reduced from 10 to 6.
  • Thanks to Misery for inspiring this change.

• Sniper Balance:
  • The range on the sniper's gamma ray laser has moved from 50 to 12, and ammo has dropped from 70 to 20. Still very powerful as an effect.
  • The sniper's sight range has moved from 50 to 12 (as opposed to the usual 8 per exo).
  • Thanks to Histidine for inspiring these changes.

• Updated the tooltip for the human cryo pods to make it clear that they just have to survive to the end of the mission for you to get the loot.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting.

• The basic tooltip at the bottom of the screen now mentions that you can hold shift to attack the ground.
  • Thanks to Tridus and Histidine for reporting.

• When you are in the store window, the exo customization window, or the inventory window, your outer screen will no longer pan invisibly behind there.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting.

• The part picker in the exo customization view now shows the full tooltip when you hover over anything there.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• The function of the mouse clicks in the store are now consistent with what the instructional text tells you.
  • Thanks to Histidine for reporting.

• The "click a mission to start" tooltip no longer shows into the store or the exo customization screens.
  • Thanks to Tridus for reporting.

Better Difficulty Level Balance

• The health of exos now varies by difficulty:
  • 10x higher on easy.
  • 4x higher on normal
  • Same on hard as it was before.
  • 0.75x on expert.
  • Thanks to Tridus for inspiring this change.

• The first X missions now have hand-designed mixes of bots that should provide a more natural progression. It then becomes purely-random after these missions are done.
  • Easy: 10 days
  • Normal: 5 days
  • Hard: 3 days
  • Expert: 0 days
  • Thanks to Tridus for inspiring this change.

• The first X days no longer include the "special bots" like sentry bots, razorbots, etc, instead letting you get your bearings (and your parts in order) first:
  • Easy: 20 days
  • Normal: 12 days
  • Hard: 8 days
  • Expert: 0 days
  • Thanks to Tridus for inspiring this change.

Alpha 0.901

(Released September 8th, 2013)

• Fixed a couple of typos in the stealth tooltips.

• Possibly fixed that null reference exception in the GetEffectiveIsOnAlert logic. Do let us know if you see it again.

• The way that the edges of the walls look has gone back to how we did it earlier (in earlier screenshots and the PAX build), to make it more clear where the lines are between that and the unexplored areas are.

• When in the fog of war (in sensor range), objects now show up mostly as outlines, particularly the cover objects.

• When hovering over many objects (in sight range), they now show up with an outline under them hinting at their function.

• The radarbot now just makes you miss on a tile adjacent to it, not in a wildly different direction. This was the original design intent.

• Fixed a bug where entities missing a shot could never miss to the left.

• Fixed a bug where temporary system damage from EMPs was not wearing off.