We've finally reached our internal alpha milestone. This means all of the game's features are implemented and functional. Additionally, we've unlocked the next district for you to explore! It's time to head into The Grid, home of The Eternals faction.
With this update, we've also transitioned to the latest version of Unity - Unity 5. We weren't originally intending to move over to Unity 5, especially not so late into development, but Unity 5 had features which ended up being essential for being able to handle the scale of Satellite Reign's city.
Please note that this is a Windows-only release. Sit tight, a couple of small Mac/Linux issues need to be ironed out, and then they will be updated shortly.
There are countless changes in this build, but some of the more substantial changes are listed below:
The Grid District
The Grid is the home of The Eternals, an organisation fixated on moving humanity forward through body augmentation, replacing their mortal flesh with machines.
The Grid is clean, wealthy and futuristic, setting itself apart from the rest of the city.
UI Improvements
Lots of improvements have made their way into the UI system.
- Agents now have unique portraits.
- New Agent clone screen.
- Front-end menus.
- Mission debriefs.
Unity 5
We now have access to the latest and greatest Unity has to offer. This brings the latest version of PhysX for improved physics performance, much improved profiling tools (to help Mike more efficiently squash bugs and performance hogs), improved CPU usage, and much more.
Lots of these new features won't be immediately visible, but they will help us deliver a higher quality final version of Satellite Reign.
New Abilities and Items
We've added new abilities and items, as well as improved those which were already existing.
You can now outfit your agents with drones, smoke grenades, sound-dampening grenades, shield boosters, and more.
There are also new tactical opportunities with stealth-kills. Get up close behind unsuspecting enemies, and get a headshot for an instant kill. Please note that while this feature is working, it will be undergoing some design iterations soon to improve usability.
Balancing Changes
This version includes balancing changes to almost all aspects of the game, including money, experience, health, armour, and more. There's still much more balancing to go, but it is closer to what you can expect to see in the final release.
NOTE: Due to both the above balancing changes and updates to missions,
your old save files will no longer load. We try to avoid issues like these wherever possible, but with the amount of changes, loading your old saves would cause progression bugs and other unforeseen issues.
Known Issues
While we've made lots of improvements throughout the game, there are still plenty of issues to be found, and will be addressed in future updates. Some of them are listed below:
- Long load at startup.
- Cars throwing agents up in the air.
- Environment streaming is slow if you move the camera quickly.
- Out of Memory crash due to physics after extended play.
- Game can take a long time to exit.
- Framerate is still heavily affected by lots of on-screen characters.
- Cars still aren't behaving correctly.
What's Next?
We're getting very close to our full release now. As mentioned above, we've reached our alpha milestone internally, and our beta milestone is very close behind. Our next planned update will include the game in its entirety, allowing you to play completely from start to finish, with all districts, missions, abilities, weapons, gear, augmentations, and the final boss encounter.
At that point, we'll be going into HARDCORE BUG-FIXING MODE TURBO EXTREME. We expect this to occur in about a month.
Have fun!