Hello everyone! It has been a crazy week after release and we are really happy about reception of Sipho. We have got loads of feedback from around us which will help us polish the game on all rough edges. Some notable changes are increasing free spaces in areas later in the game. We got reports of navigating in those areas with a larger Sipho was hard, which was not intended. Such closed areas feel nice when Sipho just big enough to fit through, but later levels provide so much food that Sipho can be pretty wide and become easy prey if it gets stuck. To allow enjoy the game in any size we have increased passages and open areas in Buginis and Cra'Than areas. Tutorial has been improved by removing lots of flavor text and leaving only most important information. Grasping a lot of information for the first time is a lot to ask, so we had to distill information to easy to understand highlighted sections. This was a also a good time to update Dash icon together with tutorial images. So skill bar has gotten some love too - all skills are now represented by their zooids or things they drop.
We have fixed several stability issues which interrupted play sessions. Game no longer will get stuck entering growth mode while entering boss fight. Game will not be saved when quitting, which in some rare cases resulted in player getting saved to the "void" which is an empty area. We have also potentially fixed a freeze on longer plays and if that still happens - let us know. We also had version 0.1.7 in Beta [staging] branch, but wanted to do some testing before making it public. For those who are not using Beta [staging] branch both version changes are relevant:

Version 0.1.8

• Don't save game outside of gameplay scenes
• Dive button chargers dive instead of diving instantly
• Fix zooid overlap exploit
• Larger spaces in later zones
• Moved zooid pickup to zooid effect layers so it's more visible
• Make Enemies react to poison

Version 0.1.7

• Lower environment spike damage and add chip effect
• Make boss minions not chase player if it's outside battle area
• Make reward drop radii narrower
• Add more robust system for locking controls and cinematics. Refactor Gameplay scene loader to not use coroutines. This makes all kinds of transitions nicer
• Do not async load levels - fixes level loading after player has been allowed to move, resulting in stuck positions
• Don't save game when Sipho is dead
• Have area text controller in separate canvas
• Report error when loading area with no indices - will help us catch level load issues more easily
• Assert that we are saving valid area
• Make transition effect appear after postprocessing so it would properly fade to black
• Tweak Buginis boss battle activation position
• Add correct Frakir audio
• Return false if there are no spawners to update
• Fix reward UI sometimes erroring out on game exit
• Do not enter boss battle while game is paused
• Don't allow cheesing Frakir boss so easily and enrage early
• Make bone minions less predictable
• Destroy blueprint asset after saving it
• Simplify tutorial text and update images
• Remove italics in skill description and show energy usage as yellow text
• Rotate dragged skill as well
• Add movement skill icon
• Make tutorial text appear on top of decorations
• Set correct icons for skills
• Tweak skill bar looks
• Report game version to analytics