Parasite, a modern-day survival horror roguelike

[infidel]

Yes, the next version will unlock the other three music tracks I have (had to rework music/sound system for platform reasons).

I wanted to ask about the difficulty system, what made you decide to give the option to change it after evolution stages? Far as I could tell, it only changed parameters regarding to the next core evolution stage? I didn't see the point in it to be honest, I'd rather have one overarching difficulty setting set at the start. Or, even better, no difficulty setting at all?

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. The core idea is to have separate difficulty settings for every major part of the game. So far it's survival, evolution, timeline and the group. Another idea is to have the player choose only once they access the thing. Evolution difficulty relates to all evolution process and changes how many of the free improvements you get (4/2/1), max improvement level (3/2/1), host degradation speed and total amount of habitats that you can have in the game. So the setting you choose will be in effect until the game ends.

Energy costs: unless I'm misunderstanding, there's energy costs for the parasite VS the host. Those need to be visibly and very obviously differentiated.

Hmmm. The idea here is that the host acts as a battery for parasite. So if it's on host, the host's energy will be used for every action. If it's without a host, the parasite will use its own energy pool. I'll add to my notes that I need to explain that in the manual (that'll come later).

Oh, I wanted to ask what dropping items actually does, how deep does the interactivity go? I dropped money on the ground once while being chased, because I assumed they would attract attention and give me some breathing room, but I didn't have the chance to circle back to see if it worked.

Money is a spam object that's useless for now but I'm hoping once I expand the game you will use it for various purposes. I like the idea but you're usually chased by the law so I don't think this would work All the other items are used by the host.

The UI would benefit massively from some moving things around/context. GOAL/OPTIONS/LOG/EXIT shortcuts should always be placed last or completely separated and perhaps also have a different color code to signify they are not directly related to things you can do ingame. The message about having to restart / press enter should be clickable too.
Also, F being fullscreen is vital information!

I'll think about differentiating visually the action list and buttons. Noted about the restart message. In the next version I'm working on there's a main menu, and fullscreen is added to the options.

 

[Rean]

Yes, the next version will unlock the other three music tracks I have (had to rework music/sound system for platform reasons).

Nice.

Another idea is to have the player choose only once they access the thing.

Yeah, I'd prefer that.

Money is a spam object that's useless for now but I'm hoping once I expand the game you will use it for various purposes. I like the idea but you're usually chased by the law so I don't think this would work All the other items are used by the host.

Damn, I was sure it'd work. I think it would be a good idea to distract other people though!

I'll add to my notes that I need to explain that in the manual (that'll come later).

Yeah, a short manual would be quite helpful. I do prefer something to read over a tutorial section/video, I'm probably in the minority of gaymers though.

 

[infidel]

v0.8

There are no gameplay changes in this one but a lot of maintenance stuff that should make playing the game more comfortable. The one small feature I'm most proud of is that you can now shift-click or shift-press number to auto-repeat harden grip and reinforce control actions. Players brought their inherent spamminess which made them a source of mistakes to my attention. Sound and music subsystem was changed, that will increase the sound quality and also restore the remaining three music tracks that I did earlier. Sound/music will require another pass at some point in the future. More sound effects are needed, the ambience should be enriched and my music mixing skills are now significantly better than they were in 2019 (as in I had almost none, hehehehehe) so I want to redo all of these music tracks and start working on the new ones.

UI had two big changes. Firstly, there is now the main menu that the game starts with. Options window and quit menu items are now in there and these buttons are no longer in the HUD. Options window was expanded with the advanced section which features some useful and interesting flags. I've also fixed more bugs in the body/evolution window that I missed earlier. Check out the full details below, there is smaller but important stuff there, too. More players have asked about the save system so this will be incoming in the next big update, please wait a little longer

Oh yeah, the Linux version should now be working.

Changes:

• Linux version is up
  
• Sound/music subsystem replaced which coincidentally also increases sound samples quality and restores 3 additional music tracks.
  
• Pressing shift-click or shift+number will now auto-repeat two common actions that need spamming with the short delay between them. In case of harden grip the action will be repeated until hold is 100, in case of reinforce control until control is 90. This is made into a setting just in case, tell me what do you think of it. Path delay is renamed to repeat delay and will now control both the mouse path movement and this.
  
• Main menu added. Options and quit access moved to the main menu. F6, F10 shortcuts will continue to work but the HUD buttons were removed. Non-working save game menu item added to
  troll the players
  remind me that I need to implement the save system. The game will now show the main menu at start.
  
• Options window added advanced options:
  • Amount of log lines visible in HUD
    
  • Center camera on player near map edges - was the current behavior since 0.7.1 and can now be disabled
    
  • Laptop movement keys (uiojklm,.)
    
  • Extended gameplay information - this one exposes some of the stuff and math happening under the hood if you're interested in deeper knowledge of the game
    
  • Shift-click/number repeats the action until the logical end
  
  
• Fullscreen added to options and made more robust (ESC button will no longer exit fullscreen mode), F shortcut disabled
  
• Goal window will show current society knowledge for the tutorial goal that requires it
  
• When the player steps on biomineral formation, the log will explain the habitat energy produced and consumed. Also it'll show how much energy/health will be restored by it.
  
• Alert log messages are now subtly animated to grab attention (I'll also add a sound effect once I do the sound effects pass).
  
• Easy/normal group difficulty will now show alert message dialog when the team is close.
  
• New "radio" state icon added when human AI tries to call for help
  
• Restart game when the game is over is now a clickable action
  
• HUD menu buttons will now be highlighted when they appear first during the tutorial

Fixes:

• UI fixes for body and evolution windows (phew, that should be the end of it. right? right?...)
  
• Find a clue tutorial goal text changed to explain that any clue will suffice.
  
• Close button returned to document window.
  
• Fix for waiting with mouse click in region mode.

 

[infidel]

v0.9 is up!

Savegame support, Steam overlay enabled, spoon mode and a variety of fixes.

When I started working on this update, my initial plan was to make save/load support and then move on to the basic evolution rebalance. Unfortunately, that was not meant to be. I knew that savegame support was a serious task but it turned out it was even more serious then I thought. Without going into too much technical details, my favorite highly dynamic method of programming does not gel well with serialization/deserialization (in fact I will have to keep that in mind in the future). The saving wasn't that hard but restoring the correct state after loading the game was a much harder task. In the end I've had to rewrite chunks of low/mid-level code to make the game state serializable and properly restorable so I fully expect there to be savegame related bugs. iwanPlays helped a lot with the QA so it seems stable enough but there's just a myriad of possibilities some of which may result in the game not loading correctly. If you notice any bugs after you've loaded the game, please send the exceptions.txt file and the savegame itself to me with the description because we all love these broken savegames, do we?

Anyway, following my general philosophy on this game, saving has an associated difficulty. That's right, you've read me correctly, easy difficulty allows the player up to 10 saves per game in any point, normal only up to 3 and you can only save in the sewers, while hard difficulty limits you to a single save total, also only in the sewers. Bonus points to you if these numbers - 10/3/1 seem familiar... Speaking of difficulty, now you can select overall difficulty in the options menu and the game will automatically choose it for you when necessary.

At this point you're probably wondering, what's this spoon mode that was mentioned earlier? Well, it's the result of a short discussion on the Steam forums with the players. The game is brutally hard for some and they want to relax some of the gameplay restrictions just to have some fun. This would, of course, break the balance so I've decided to add a hidden options menu where you can enable these changes in the game. It's hidden mostly because the new players are not supposed to enable anything in it right from the start. After enabling any of the two flags, the game gets officially spooned and you will have to disable the flags and start a new one to play like you're supposed to again. To get into the spoon mode options, you need to click on the OPTIONS menu title letters to form the word SPOON. At this point the hidden menu opens. There are only two options there now but I encourage you to ask for more on the forums. If it's not too hard or problematic, I'll implement it.

That's all I have for now.

Changes:

• Save/load games support with a difficulty setting
  
• Steam overlay should work now, at least on Windows. Untested on Linux
  
• All NPCs now have fixed art chosen on game start. Before they've regenerated every time they've spawned (and noone noticed!)
  
• Easy evolution difficulty starting improvements reduced to 2
  
• Hard survival difficulty setting now disables the rescue dog
  
• New icons for female cops, courtesy of iwanPlays
  
• New icons for kevlar armored and fully armored blackops, courtesy of iwanPlays (now you can distinguish between the two visually)
  
• Random delay introduced in sound playing, hopefully reducing the problems when a lot of AIs shoot at the same time
  
• Overall difficulty setting in the options
  
• Super-secret spoon mode
  • No energy loss on habitat death, habitat maximum count does not decrease
    
  • Open all basic mutations at start

Fixes:

• Sound should no logger stop in long sessions

 

[infidel]

v0.10

Rebalancing, proper sciencey fluff for evolution improvements and a couple of features including early invasion

The focus of this update is on a long overdue writing for the improvement texts. I think the placeholder improvement names are from... 2019? 2018? I don't remember. Anyway, the improvements were also in need of rebalancing, since there were clear winners and a lot of very clear losers. In general, not a single one was nerfed, but some were buffed to improve their usability. Any attacks now have a consistent energy spend between them. Firearms still have a clear advantage once you get the relevant skill up for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the ammo isn't there yet (it will be at some point). And secondly, the basic improvements set is not designed to be combat-competitive, all of these are to improve your survival chance while you're running away. The combat set of improvements and aggressive playstyle support is incoming in the future but I've no date to give you.

There are a few interesting additions to the improvements section. Neurotoxin projectiles (previously paralysis spit) now has a small instakill chance to differentiate it from the slime spit (which is now called mucilaginous fluid, cheers if you can say it fast three times in a row). But the most interesting addition is for the decay accelerant improvement. I recall how I painfully researched some biology to come up with a good description, spent some time working on the body despawn implementation and raising the alertness/group interest from it, and in the end it was all made obsolete by the fact that the player can go drop a body in the sewers. First I wanted to remove it altogether but I came up with an idea that it could give you a healing item. At this point in the development, it's the only way you can stock up on heals (and the only way to heal a host) so the improvement now has good value IMO since the body feature is also pretty cheap to grow and made even cheaper.

While iterating on the improvements I've realized that it was a good time to implement some needed restrictions. The amount of body features on a single host is now limited by the constitution. The amount of inventory items by the strength stat and you get bonuses from assimilation. I've also noticed another glaring hole in the design and now each attack will require a small amount of energy. The firearms are still deadly (and they should be) but this is a limitation for the future.

Now the final change that I want to address separately is called early invasion. I've received a suggestion that there is an unwinnable state in the game and on how to give the player a chance in that case. Since the parasite requires at least 30 energy to harden the grip and invade the host, if it has less than that number, it's a dead, erm, creature, uh, slithering. So upon thinking I've implemented a new action, called "early invasion". If the parasite is attached to the host and its energy is low, this action appears in the list. It allows you to invade the host "early" while its not fully subdued. There are two caveats: first, it has a chance to succeed which is dependent on the grip amount (basically grip is a percentage chance) with modifications according to the survival difficulty setting. And secondly, every attempt costs life for the parasite. A failed attempt costs more. This way if the player manages to find a host while dying, they now have a few final desperate attempts before dying. Hope you like it

Well, that's all I've got to say, now I can work on adding some new content to the game. Have fun!

Improvements changes:

• ??Host energy bonus -> Adipose tissue layer
• ??Acid spit -> Gastric hypersecretion - damage increased, energy lowered
• ??Slime spit -> Mucilaginous fluid - energy lowered
• ??Paralysis spit -> Neurotoxin projectiles - small instakill chance added (depends on the amount of armor on the target)
• ??Panic gas -> Hallucinogen gas
• ??Paralysis gas -> Ballistospores
• ??Attach efficiency -> Sudden leap
• ??Hold efficiency -> Constriction
• ??Control efficiency -> Regulated neurotransmission
• Decay acceleration will now spawn a cookie delicious nutrients item that can restore host health and energy, cysts body feature grow cost reduced
• Assimilation/Watcher molds growth cost reduced
• Antibody generators health bonus increased
• Mucus from the mucilaginous fluid improvement now has AI status icon
• Microvascular networks now give more strength

Changes:

• Early invasion mechanic
• Maximum amount of body features is now limited by host constitution. Assimilated hosts can have 2 more body features
• Maximum amount of inventory items is now limited by host strength. Same, +2 items for assimilated hosts
• Each attack will now require a small amount of energy to spend. Since assimilated hosts do not have a passive energy decrease, this amount will be smaller due to that
• Raised initial team distance to give the player a few more turns of relative calm
• Tutorial can now be skipped via the options. Note that you also have to set the overall difficulty to some value. The game treats the skip as if 200 turns have passed from the start
• Player info in the HUD will now be additionally animated when the parasite is without a host and has low energy
• Game window now has a minimal size

Fixes:

• Savegame loading fix

 

[Hag]

This early invasion mechanic is good, it was always a bit saddening to realize you're stuck in a can't win situation.
Other changes look nice too, good job.

 

[infidel]

v0.11 - Labs Update One

I've started working on this update by fleshing out the expanded design for the labs areas. At that point, labs were not much different from other locations, civilians and security, and one lab holding the event goal for timeline progression, the -REDACTED-, of course. There are three parts that I wanted to expand the labs in, these are adding the unique art and location generator, the unique optional gameplay with rewards and unique required gameplay for timeline. After I was done with sketching out the design, I realized that each of these has enough work in it to keep me busy for the amount of time I usually reserve for a single update. To make matters worse, I fell sick with cold for a week or so (in the middle of the hot summer, I know, but drinking much cold beverages daily does that easily for me). So I started work on the first part - the generator and finding unique art. iwanPlays supported me earlier with scientist tiles.

So after some weeks of work I got the basis of the new "buildings with indoors" generator working that will be used for locations like this. Actual windows, tables and doors are there. The clue spawning was revisited, too, the clues have more art in there and they spawn only on tables. Also labs have floor drains, the larger of these the parasite can use to get into the sewers if needed. The generator was slow enough in coming and after I was mostly done with it, my vacation came up. It'll take three weeks and I'll try working but it's unlikely that I will get much done (I intend to start writing ingame encyclopedia). I didn't want to keep the game without any updates for another month so I'm making an intermediate labs update with the intent on following with more. Hope you'll like the new look.

Note: I'm not fully confident that all savegames from the previous versions will load correctly, there could be potential cases where the game might not be completable due to the labs changes.

Changes:

• Facility (labs) generation
• New clue spawning in labs
• Readables (clues) in labs can be grabbed when near them
• Team members now look appropriately for the area
• Host turns left to live number is now shown in the HUD (takes into account evolution, body features growing if they're active, assimilation and other variables).
• In-world sounds volume is now modulated by distance to player
• Probe brain action is now colored if it will give you clues or skills
• Probe brain action is now repeatable through Shift key modifier. Repeating works only until all clues and skills have been learned (or until the host dies). If the host brain holds nothing of interest, the action will not repeat.
• Added tutorial hints about communications and host degradation
• Reduced maximum energy loss on habitat destruction on easy group difficulty
• Key shortcuts display styles updated to be consistent across the HUD and all windows
• Habitats left number will be hidden until you get the improvement

Fixes:

• Savegame loading fix for AI items and skills
• Loading fix for arrays like known items/objects
• Human AI names are now saved
• Hopefully the last ghost objects fix (ghost objects are the ones that you can sometimes see in the upper left corner of the game window)

 

[infidel]

v0.12 - Ingame encyclopedia and host preservator

The vacation is over and the update is ready. This release marks the addition of the thing that has long been on my radar. I'm talking about ingame encyclopedia. A lot of people ask questions about this and that part of game, or end up confused or even wrong, and before there was no place they could receive the basic information apart from my answers and Steam discussions. Since I'm not all that good at keeping details in my head, some of the answers had me consulting the code and that took valuable time. Don't stop asking questions and giving feedback since that makes me think hard about the game. But now you can also read the explanations and intent behind some of the design. I've intentionally left off anything related to the mechanics and sources of actual evolution improvements (apart from the habitat growths and brain probe), this information is best discovered on your own. I think I've covered all the topics but there might be something I missed. Side note: you can actually write decent code even if there are people drinking, chatting and watching movies around you if you use brown noise and music combo to keep focus. Small kids are harder to ignore but thankfully, there was only one.

After I finished working on the encyclopedia I've had some time left so I went ahead and added one of the requested features into the game: now you can store hosts in your habitat and return to them when needed. For that you must evolve and build a preservator growth. The amount of hosts that can be preserved with one of these is calculated from the level and assimilated hosts gain benefits to starting control value. That leaves only one question: how would you gain access to that improvement? Well, that's easy, just find a --REDACTED-- with --REDACTED-- somewhere in the --REDACTED--. Anyway, have fun.

Changes:

• Encyclopedia articles and UI
• Preservator improvement and habitat growth
• Additional visibility code to better draw walls when the player is close to them
• More starting control on assimilated hosts after invasion

Fixes:

• Fix for brain probe action when attached to host
• Loading AI mask bug fix

 

[infidel]

v0.13 - Labs Update Two and Parthenogenesis​

The main focus of this release was scenario-related changes to the research labs. I don't want to spoil them but now there is an additional bit of gameplay that you will have to do once you reach the <REDACTED>. Nothing too serious, just a little more meat on the bones. This also served as a test of sorts for the amount of work needed to implement special scenario logic with custom ingame objects. The results are promising and after some changes to the low-level code I can now spawn objects on the region map, move area objects between areas and make logic that is related to multiple objects. I won't go into any technical details here, this post already promises to be quite large.

Lab areas now feature ventilation covers which the parasite can use to go "through the walls" in some places. This is very risky and situational since you will have to leave the host outside. Sorry, no man-sized ventilation shafts, hehehe. Another thing that was added are the security guard spots. Now security often guards the outer building doors and sometimes inner ones. If they leave their spots due to alert, they will try very hard to return back once they calm down. Another change done to the scenario lab area is that now if you raise the area alertness high enough by not being careful, you will not be allowed to leave the lab until you complete the related goals. This is only for the scenario lab, the other ones work as usual.

I have to warn you, there might be problems with savegames due to the changes. I couldn't think of a way to make them fully compatible with the scenario changes. In the best case the old savegames won't have the new gameplay available. If nothing changes in the lab once the plot leads you to find the <REDACTED>, wait until the next game. There is another labs-related update planned, and that one will be about the additional location-based gameplay with unique player rewards. Sorry, but no details until it's implemented.

There were two small but important changes that deserve a mention. Previously, there was no limit to the amount of security/law enforcement that responds to the alerts and often you'd be swamped by infinite cops. There is now a cap to this amount so that the total amount of law response is limited by the area type.

The second change is more of a fix. While testing something with two nearby security guards I noticed that no matter how much I shot one of them, the other one just didn't care. Well, it turned that I had a nasty bug in the ingame sounds code that didn't use the given sound radius to propagate. Essentially the radius was always zero. It wasn't that apparent because on receiving damage the alert propagated to nearby AI by different logic. So I've fixed it and added the "sounds" to all of the weapons. Both this fix and the change are pretty low-level so I'm hoping I didn't make the game harder for the more aggressive playstyle (it's not like it wasn't already too hard before, heh).

Parthenogenesis and rebirth​

Now for the other big addition. After I was done with the planned changes I've noticed that I had a good chunk of time left before the release so I picked one of the features that is often requested by the players and did it. I'll just make the pedia article speak for itself:

After you evolve the Parthenogenesis improvement, the parasite gains access to the rebirth process. Normally, if it dies, it's game over but if you have the rebirth set up, the parasite will just move on to the "next life" with some losses. The first thing you need is to create the ovum object in region mode. It is a process similar to the microhabitat spawning. Go to the nearest sewers, pick a good spot on region map and activate the "Create ovum" action. Pick the place carefully because you will need to travel there to change settings and the parasite will be reborn there each time. The ovum itself is not in any danger from the antagonists at the moment and you can only build one.

Once the ovum is created, stepping on its tile will show you the info about its level and what improvements are marked for rebirth. There are two actions available. "Set improvements" opens the interface to lock and unlock which of the basic improvements you want to be reborn with. The second action, "Nurture ovum", allows you to feed your current host to the ovum, adding points to the next level. Each new level requires more points and there is a maximum ovum level. Different types of hosts will give you different amount of points. In general, the more dangerous the host type is, the more points the ovum will receive.

The rebirth process happens automatically on parasite death. At this point a new parasite will appear on the ovum location. The ovum level will be reduced by one. If the current ovum level is zero, it is the final death and game over. The basic improvements that were locked will stay with you, the rest will be discarded and you will receive another set of starting improvements. The basic improvements are the ones that can be received when you first open the evolution process in tutorial. All the ones that you've acquired during the gameplay after that will not be discarded. However, there is a large chance that some of them will degrade by one level to a minimum of one. Any evolution points that you've gained over the current improvement level will also be reset.

Pretty neat, huh?

Changes:

• Parthenogenesis improvement and rebirth-related changes
• New art for <REDACTED> courtesy of iwanPlays
• Scenario-related research labs changes
• Each area type now has a modifier to the base area alertness raise formula. The labs and military bases have the highest.
• You cannot leave the scenario-related lab if you raise the alertness high enough until you complete the appropriate scenario goals
• Ventilation covers and the ability to pass through them when not on host
• Lab security now sometimes guards doors, new AI state and logic for that
• Law response is now capped to maximum according to area info
• Weapon sounds now propagate into the world and alert AI

Fixes:

• Ambushes in normal areas will now also set a "cannot leave" timer
• Ingame sound code propagation radius fix
• Fix for save/loading AI alert timer
• Fix for save/loading backup arrive event
• Fix for leaving the host during shift-action

 

[infidel]

v0.14 - Sandbox Mode and Pseudocampus

This release brings the often requested sandbox mode into the game. The current plotted scenario is moved into a separate choice during the game start. There is no timeline, no clue gathering, no plot-related events and no NPCs in the sandbox mode, otherwise it plays the same. You can play the sandbox mode indefinitely, you cannot "win" the game. Two key changes were introduced to supplement this mode (they work with the scenario mode too):

The first change is that now if you kill off all the ambushers in the habitat, it will not be destroyed. The Group goes into the timeout until they can spend more resources to gather another team of operatives. Same thing will happen with the street ambush. Successful killing of the team is not easy, especially once the level of the team raises but you do have the reward for that now.

The second change is the addition of the Pseudocampus improvement into the game. It opens up the access to the organ which upon activation will plant the false memories into the host brain, and the parasite will then automatically leave the host. After that, it only has a short amount of time to slink off somewhere before the host is alerted. But if everything goes right, there will be no alert raised. In case of a common human this improvement is of limited use for a non-lethal gameplay style. But in case of a team member or a blackops operative the false memories will result in a significant raise of the team distance. Note that the blackops are especially juicy in that regard, doubling the base value. In short, this opens up the possibility of evading the antagonists indefinitely. You might have noticed that as usual I've neglected to describe how to gain access to that precious improvement... Well, I will continue the good tradition and won't say it

The game is now much closer to the full release since the first Steam release so I'm raising the price by 2 USD or its regional equivalent.

Changes:

• Sandbox mode, current plot scenario can be accessed by choosing SCENARIO A at game start
• Pseudocampus improvement for planting false memories
• Brain probe on team agents/blackops will now also give Group knowledge (in addition to event NPCs)
• Repelling the ambush will now result in team deactivation

Fixes:

• Agents will not spawn in wilderness anymore (ambushes still can, actually probably not a bad place to handle one, now that I think about it, no witnesses...)
• Fix for sound effects volume changes not working until game restart

 

[infidel]

v0.16 - L-LET'S HAVE A C-CHAT...

There is now a conversation mode ingame. The parasite can chat with its host and later with the other NPCs. How it works is you first need to complete the tutorial (open access to the timeline), then use one host for a period of time until the affinity between you grows to a high degree. At this point a new menu action "Converse With" opens up which leads into the conversation mode. The purpose of any conversation is to gain the consent of the interlocutor. Each turn the list of actions is regenerated from a list of possible ones. Using the analyze action you can gain information about what the target wants and their character aspects if there are any. These, in turn, influence the result of manipulative actions to be positive or negative.

At first your chat attempts will fail due to the lack of skills but you can use the brain probe on hosts to get some, plus these skills are increased on each communication attempt. Once the consent is high enough, the rewarding actions open up. These may include questioning for information (gathering timeline clues), consulting for skill gains, requesting items (try to get a cop to give their gun to you!), de-escalation of area alertness and even some related to the --REDACTED--. In case of the host, the highest reward is maximum consent itself, since it makes the host agreeable to the parasite's presence, which results in a lot of energy-related benefits, the main one being that area movement will not spend any energy of the host. Maximum host consent also allows the parasite to use their mouth to speak with other NPCs.

The conversation is, of course, not without inherent dangers. Some manipulative actions risk provoking a negative reaction, up to and including violence. Some can result in NPCs getting emotional with very negative results. The NPCs are still alerted by seeing you but the positive manipulation offsets this. The most important thing is that instead of the host energy, chatting requires parasite energy which means that parasite can exhaust itself and die while trying to communicate. There are more details about the mechanics in the ingame encyclopedia. Enjoy!

NOTE: The price of the game was increased by 1 USD or your regional equivalent.

Changes:

• Conversation mode
• Host affinity and agreeableness
• Skills are now sorted and grouped in the lists
• Security now has radios (I wonder why they didn't...)
• Energy word replaced with icon everywhere
• Paper clues in generic locations are reduced in number
• Blackops now have bonus attributes
• Spoon mode: No ambushes in habitats flag
• HUD now has "team is very close" text marker when that happens
• Reverted colors for team distance and changed wording in the body window

Fixes:

• Clicking on self in region mode does not skip a turn now

Since Codexbros love more detailed mechanics discussions, I'll post the ingame pedia page, too:

Spoiler

Host: Affinity

Spending enough time using the same host will result in raising affinity with it. When you reach high enough affinity, you will open the possibility of conversation and acquiring host consent. Eventually the affinity will reach maximum and you will receive a message about it. The host name will have a green [A] icon after it in the HUD in case of the maximum affinity. Leaving a host with full affinity will result in parasite losing some maximum energy. That reduction is small enough. However, if such host dies while the parasite is on it, the loss will be much higher. Therefore if you intend to lose the host, do not kill it. Note also, that hosts that have both full affinity and consent do not get alerted when they see the parasite. In fact, you can quickly hop onto such a host again after leaving them.

Host: Conversation

Having high affinity with the host opens up the conversation action. The main purpose of the conversation is to gain host consent. Maximum consent is marked with a green [C] icon in the HUD near the host name and makes significant changes to the gameplay. Firstly, the agreeable host uses way less energy to do some actions (and movement in region mode). Secondly, passive energy loss in area mode is reduced to zero, which essentially means that movement becomes free. Thirdly, the host control grows by itself every turn for agreeable hosts. Lastly, and most importantly, the host consent gives the parasite an ability to converse with humans using the mouth of the host. The second purpose of the consent is to open up secondary actions. Those include questioning for gathering clues, requesting items, consulting for learning skills, area alert de-escalation for police officers and subversion for the group members to raise the team distance (if you're bold enough to talk to them). Note that group members always have knowledge about some timeline event.

The conversation uses four skills: psychology, and three skills from the manipulation group: coaxing, coercion and deception. Each of the manipulative actions requires a successful roll to be used properly. Psychology is used to roll for Analyze action. This action will report a textual description of the interlocutor state giving hints on how to progress. Each NPC has a basic need and a character aspect. The need changes which actions are treated as positive or negative for gaining consent. The aspect makes further changes into the basic conversation routine.

Every conversation turn the list of actions is re-rolled. Each of the actions bound to the coaxing and deception skills usually increase or lower consent depending on the interlocutor need. For coaxing these are Assure, Discuss and Encourage actions. For deception skill the list is Distort, Flatter and Lie. There are four more actions in the coercion skill: Threaten, Scare and Shock. These do mostly the same thing if successful, they shake the interlocutor out of balance and act as a multiplier for the next manipulative action, whether the result was positive or negative. The remaining coercion action, Provoke, acts to reduce the conversation fatigue.

Some of the actions (especially the coercive ones) risk making the interlocutor emotional. In this case, some manipulative actions can be used to calm them down. If that does not happen, the emotion will become stronger and eventually result in a negative conversation outcome. Emotions behavior almost always depends on character aspects.

You cannot move or save during the conversation and it will be interrupted if something happens nearby putting it on a timeout. Reaching maximum fatigue will do the same thing. Note that during the conversation the AI is alerted using the same rules as before. However, positive and negative manipulative actions will respectively lower or raise the alertness of the interlocutor allowing them not to become alerted in case of successful conversation. The most important bit of knowledge is saved for last: during the conversation the parasite energy is always used instead of the host energy. That means that you can die during the conversation in the worst-case scenario. Have fun!

 

[Rean]

You might wanna rename 'Scenario A' to something more thematic. Oh, and maybe remove some redundant 'The' from entities, like when the parasite infests a dog, "The the dog tries to tear you away".

 

[motherfucker]

Ah yes the Hebrew Simulator 2023

 

[infidel]

You might wanna rename 'Scenario A' to something more thematic. Oh, and maybe remove some redundant 'The' from entities, like when the parasite infests a dog, "The the dog tries to tear you away".

Missed that one, gonna fix it. But "scenario A" is intended - I believe the player should not know what scenario they select unless they played it before. The letter A is for alien, but this won't be the case for other scenarios once I get to those.

 

[infidel]

The soundtrack is out:

Surprisingly, this performed better than the nearby cosmic horror video, hehehe.

 

[infidel]

v0.17 - Extremely hostile takeover

Sorry the new release took so long but it's a pretty hefty one. Firstly, the "engine" I used to draw the ingame entities has been removed in favor of low-level draw calls which made my life much, much easier (the usual scene with entities approach is amazingly ineffective and cumbersome for a procedurally generated open world tile-based game) and removed a whole class of bugs related to dynamically managing entities but it also exposed the ingame art in PNG format. You can find it now in the "resources/app/img/" folder along with the rest of UI images. Also this opens up the possibility of working on mod support in the future. I will create a sticky thread in the Steam forum where both potential mod authors and players can tell me their ideas so I can have a better understanding of the work needed to support that.

Not only that, the "engine" change now allows me to do simple animations and particles. Now all ranged weapon shots will draw particles and blood splots. I will likely improve and increase their amount in the future but that is not the game's focus so don't expect anything elaborate.

Secondly, the final mission of scenario A has been improved and reworked. There is now a new area type - corporate office floor. You start in the elevator and have to go through some hoops to go to your target. I won't spoil anything. Moreover, there are now two more variations of the final mission, so at the start of the game it will pick randomly what mission do you have to do to complete the game.

NOTE: I'm not entirely sure whether the old savegames will be completable (or loadable even) due to the scenario changes so I advise you to start a new game if you encounter a game-breaking bug after loading an old savegame. It wasn't possible to make the savegames 100% compatible this time.

Thirdly, some more QOL improvements to the game were implemented, read the full changes list below.

Now let me share a few thoughts. The first scenario is now in a good shape so the game is pretty close to public release (though I fully expect some bugs from the engine change and new additions). There are two large gameplay expansions that I feel like have the highest priority. One is all about the combat and another is base building. The combat was always bare-bones and simplistic due to the survival focus of the game. However, many people expect it to be much more viable. Because of that, I've been thinking about not only enhancing the combat experience but adding a viable combat-heavy path through the game. OTOH, the base building feels a bit lackluster and would go very well with the "cult experience" which is a natural extension of the chat gameplay. Both of these expansions would also work best in separate scenarios that would have this new gameplay as a theme and focus instead of the basic survival of scenario A.

So, I have three options to ponder upon: leave the expansions to be done after the game's release, implement one before the release or implement both of them. Tell me what you think.

NOTE: The game is now much closer to the public release so in a week's time I will increase the base price by 1 USD again (or your regional equivalent).

Changes:

• Replaced the "engine" used to draw the game graphics (in-game images are now in resources/app/img/ folder)
• New graphics, AI, generator, gameplay and music track (thanks MaxStack!) for corporate office area type
• Updates to scenario A for the final mission to take place in new corpo area
• Two more variations of the final mission of scenario A
• Custom difficulty presets: creating new ones, editing, saving and deletion
• Animated particles for ranged weapons shots
• Blood splashes
• Bullets hitting glass will produce a sound (no breakable glass, sorry)
• Ingame minimap (accessed through mutation that is not that hard to find)
• Team members will not be spawned in the very first area of the game (to make life easier for the new players)
• Weapon can be marked as active in the inventory (it will be used for attacks instead of the first one in the list when no active weapon is set)
• Dog host can bark to attract humans
• Corporation area cannot be entered without a host

Fixes:

• Uncommon AI now spawns as correct law type for the area
• Fix for maximum alert and cannot leave logic (alertness will not go down once raised to max in corp)
• Ambush will also finish after the last AI is under player's control
• Nurturing ovum is disallowed once it reaches max level
• Installing <REDACTED> on <REDACTED> is now an agreeable action (energy cost reduced to 1 when the host is agreeable)

 

[infidel]

v0.18 - Pickman's Model

Last time I've said I wanted to start the work on the last major addition to the game before the release but before that I've decided to try out how's it going on the AI art scene. So after endless nights of prompting I present to you the art update. The ingame icons were not changed but I added a lot of art for ingame events, difficulty selection and improvements. While working on it I also decided to add images to most of the pedia articles to illustrate the points. And then I added the main menu background art just for the fun of it. This led me to notice the lack of decent fonts in the game so I added these as well. There are now more appropriate default fonts plus there is a font selector in the options menu. I continued tweaking the visuals until I think I got it right now so here it is.

And after that was done, armed with the gajillion new art, I updated the store and library art as well. The woman on the cover is one of my two favorite images, I really dig how it turned out.

Changes:

• All-new event, difficulty selection, pedia and improvements art
• New ingame fonts and font selection in options
• Lots of small UI tweaks with fonts and colors
• Options do not need game restart now
• You can now throw money for a single-use temporary paralysis cloud

Fixes:

• Disabled keyboard HUD actions while any windows are open

Here's how the game looks now with the new fonts:

And check out the examples of the new art:


This one's my favorite menu background: