Hellooo Agents (✿◕‿◕)

Today's update features some lovely artwork from Emett! Go check out their work!

A special thanks to everyone who left a review this week. Be sure to join the discord if you wanna leave feedback, or see cool pictures of frogs!

This update features a rework for the BBS side contracts. The goal was to make these missions more fun and interesting, and balance them better to fit with the difficulty curve of the main story. This system is also flexible enough to generate missions for the future roguelike mode.

I'll also be writing a little development update underneath the patch notes for those of you interested.

Here are da notes.

Missions BBS Rework!

• Created the new "kit" generation system for levels. Layouts are more interesting.
• BBS missions now support locked doors. This wasn't possible previously because I couldn't guarantee that everywhere in the level was accessible with the old system. There may be some edge cases where this causes problems so be sure to lemme know if u see that happening!
• BBS missions can now feature tons of computers from the campaign.
• BBS missions can now generate with different sizes.
• Added pretty new floor shaders to spice up the visual variety.
• Missions can now be selected based off of size and enemy level. Contracts can still spawn with small sizes in the late game if you just want a quick little mission to do.
• Enemy equipment is now featured in mission selection independent of the mission modifier. You'll be fighting a much more diverse selection of enemies.
• New "Collect" Mission type. A fairly simple mode that requires you to pick up keycards scattered around the level. Perfect for speedy agents.
• Added lots of new modifiers, modifiers become more common as mission level increases. Special modifiers unlock as you complete missions in the story.
• Added a new layered noise system. This creates slightly more interesting visual effects as a backdrop to missions past level 3.
• Added some new B-sides to the BBS soundtrack. Mission themes can now appear in BBS missions after completing the corresponding mission.
• Added some checks to prevent objectives from spawning literally right next to the player's spawn.

I have more updates planned for side contracts, but this is a huge improvement over the old system imo and I think feedback is necessary before going further.

Other Changes

• Added THISBOYB to the musical guest credits. Apologies for forgetting this! Go check out their soundcloud.
• Many particle effects, such as blood, sparks, and landmine bits now bounce off walls. Looks cool B)
• Enemy pathfinding now understands the concept of "diagonal," meaning enemies can get across the map quicker and look more natural doing so. Look out!
• Black Knight Update! These babies felt kinda unfair since they were given continuous sight of the player after landing. Now knights will move to defend points of interest on the map after landing, including the player's position for one time only. However, drop pods now carry 1 extra knight, and knights come equipped with an ability, oh no!
• the_dog now uses the bypass hacking attack
• Massively buffed auto hacker turrets. These things used to guarantee die in one hit, now they have health levels somewhere between an humanoid and a standard turret.
• Many melee based abilities automatically swap the user to melee mode if not there already.
• Added like 15 new skeleton sprites.
• Buffed the Deepfake ability to have 9 charges. It's still kind of a weak ability, so I'll look into updating it in the future.
• Enemies using melee can now sprint to close larger gaps while in combat.
• the_dog no longer appears in a certain mirror past a certain story mission.
• lots of small fixes, mostly visual bugs, and things in levels not rendering in the proper order.
• Fixed some typos in dialogue, and altered a line from an obscure guest at a party to eliminate absurdly stupid lore implications.
• U can now explode toilets for massive damage.

Development Update

Finally, I wanted to update everyone on the state of development. DDS had a planned Early Access period of 6 months, and has been in early access for...5 months? (;*_*)

So...the game isn't anywhere near complete. There are a couple of reasons that, some of which I can work to correct. My life has been very busy lately as I wrap up my degree and look for an actual job. This issue hopefully resolve itself in the next couple months. A lot of my dev time has been spent on bug fixes, and minor updates. While these definitely seem to be appreciated, they get in the way of completing substantial chunks of side-story content. I might take a break to just work on long term goals for a while once the next round of feedback is in. Speaking of which, the new side quest has been seriously kicking my butt! Some features are just really annoying to get working and make fun, and the story has been giving me some trouble too. At this point it's about 2/3rds complete and I'm going to be scoping it down slightly so I can complete the stupid thing in a reasonable amount of time. Another issue is that I haven't set proper deadlines for myself with everything going on. I'm gonna aim to have a strict deadline for the next sidequest by the end of this week.

All in all, DDS is gonna be in early access for a while longer than I wanted. I'm sorry that I won't be able to live up to my original promise of getting to 1.0 in 6 months. I promise to keep working and releasing updates until we reach 1.0. I don't wanna turn into one of those early access devs who never finishes their project, both so I can deliver the full thing to you and so I can get working on other games!

Thank you all for the continued feedback and support. Working on this is a pleasure and I believe DDS is a much better game now than when it initially launched thanks to all of you.

See you again soon for more fun!