Alpha 3 is out! The major changes are:

Consequences of death

From now on, dying means: dropping your inventory at the place you have been killed, and waking up somewhere in the biome where your current hideout is. This may sound easy, but in the later biomes returning to the place where you have died is sometimes very tricky.

Extracting essence

Mushrooms in the woods are more plentiful, but only certain rare kinds can be cooked for essence. This allows for bigger "trap" areas with a reward for successfully navigating them. Things that can be cooked will rot after a certain amount of time after they have been picked up. Where do you find essence, you ask? Well...

The night

During the night, you will not only see creatures, but also mutated plants. You will need to be on the lookout for them if you want to harvest their essence! Light now plays a bigger role, as staying in the shadows for too long will be a bad idea, so better fill up your generator before it gets dark!

Sound

You will need to pay much more attention to the sound you generate from now on. This means interacting with doors, moving objects, barricading etc. will bring attention to your location. This will be very important during the night, as you do not want to alert anyone to your presence.

AI changes

Stealth is harder and easier at the same time. If you are reckless, you will easily get spotted. But if you keep a low profile, you will be able to sneak through areas. Enemies will also be more forgiving in letting you know if they are alerted to your presence.

Minor:

New stuff:

- Added a popup notifying you about entering a biome. - [Experimental] If you are inside a location, you will be able to see it marked on the map. - You can pick up dropped items from the ground if you are inside your inventory. - When quitting the game, you will get notified about the time of the last save.

Changes:

- Player will no longer receive damage when waking up. - Changed balance of gasoline for generators. - The mushrooms you get after drinking from the well depend on what hideout you are currenly in. - Health / stamina potions have been removed (in favour of skills). This is temporary, as we need to find other ways to upgrade these stats.

Fixes:

- Loot no longer respawns after time in some locations. - Electronic game is now properly added to journal. - Inventory icons no longer disappear. - Fixed having multiple items selected on hotbar after death. - Fixed desynchronizing aim indicator. - It's no longer possible to appear outside of a underground location when travelling to it. - Fixed bug causing the pathfinding grid to get corrupted after loading. - Fixed issues with reloading the game after dying in a underground location. - Fixed several issues with mimics. - Fixed weird behaviour with Wolf when traveling to Doctor's house again. - Fixed ambient music sometimes cutting off. - Fixed map and poison overlays intersecting each other. - Fixed the fog in a few locations. - Fixed disappearing enemies in front of the player. - Added missing sounds to some furniture. - Fixed not getting reward after dream if your inventory was full. - Fixed rabbits being blind sometimes. - Fixed generator not emitting light if it was previously drained from fuel. - Fixed a gap in the trees at the Doctor's house, enabling the player to leave the location's bounds into the void. - Fixed being able to drink from the well even though it was day. - Fixed some issues with loading underground locations. - Optimized loading meshes. - Fixed information popup appearing in main menu. We're very happy with this update, as it fixes some major issues with how leveling / dying worked before, and lays a foundation for really cool nights. It also introduces some new issues in the long run (like gasoline being a limited resource), but nothing that can't be mended with future updates. This will probably be one of the last updates containing major changes to gameplay mechanics. After we fix a few more big things that we're unhappy with, we can finally move on to adding more content and polishing existing mechanics, yay! The Acid Wizard