Howdy Agents (◕‿◕✿)

Today I bring you DDS version 0.8.5. This update comes with a new mission, new mechanics, and some tweaks and fixes.

Thank you to everyone who left a review since our last update. As always, be sure to join the discord!

Today's update comes with some fantastic artwork from Emett, go check out their work here!

Here are da notes.

Da Notes

• Added a new early-game mission, this mission can be accessed by speaking with the strange angle fella near the beginning of the game. This will mark the the beginning of a alternate quest route to the main story with three missions in total.
  
• Gave DDS a slight visual makeover. The more extreme makeover didn't pan out the way I wanted it too, so only minor things have changed. Post processing effects now have default slider values when you boot the game up for the first time.
  
• Removed the vignette effect. Unity's built in vignette has some terrible color banding issues and it just looks awful.
  
• Fixed color banding issues for many in-game effects and user line of sight with some tasteful dithering.
  
• Rewrote the way hostile hacking is handled in DDS. This should make the system more stable, and allow me to create neat new hacking types in the future. A new hacking type appears in the new mission :O
  
• Added a new Heart Monitor computer. This device works like the tollbooth and puppet master, adding a new rule to the area. Killing a unit within its line of sight will expose the player through walls. This computer appears in the new mission, and BBS missions past a certain level.
  
• Enemies in BBS missions can now appear with alternative hacking types.
  
• The Gun Runner perk has evolved to Arms Runner, you can now run and use melee weapons as well with this perk.
  
• Fixed the damage flashing effect, should work on all enemies now.
  
• Increased blimp speed. These things are meant to be slow, but they had a little bit of trouble doing anything until now. Blimps now move about half the speed of an average humanoid, up from 1/4th speed.
  
• Spike vision around servers will now update more smoothly. Spike vision updates kinda slow for other computers as a cost-saving measure, but I have a better way to optimize this in mind for the future.
  
• Added a sound effect to sight nades.
  
• Expanded range of possible cook times and throw speeds for grenade generation.
  
• Increased sleep melee weapon time floor from 1.5s to 5s. Sleep melee weapons should all be a lot more viable now.
  
• Fixed a visual bug that could occur if a scene transition and black knight drop pod landing occurred at the same time.
  
• The demo has been updated to 0.8.5.
  

That's all for now. I should have another mission for you in a week or two. That mission is mostly complete already, but I need to finish some narrative stuff before it goes in the gam propere. If you're impatient and wanna try that new mission now, just type "go_to_scene_ AngelOutpost" into your terminal :D The mission level will be raised to match your shop level.

Thank you all for keeping up with DDS! We are nearing 1.0. Two more missions will cap off this alternate route, and then all that's left to do is add the roguelike mode and polish polish polish!