Greetings everyone! Happy past holidays and new year! Now that the festive distractions are gone we can go back to improving Sipho.
One thing that has been bothering us for a while, was how hard the game is when your Sipho is little. It is hard to balance the game to play well when your creature colony is small, made out of few movers and a weapon, and large, having dozens of buffed-up(tm) weapons, efficient energy regeneration... and skills cost the same fixed amount. So we have finally gathered our courage to attempt at balancing that through skill cost. Now, most of the skills have a lower base cost and grow their cost with each zooid:
[table][tr][th]Zooid[/th][th]Old cost[/th][th]Cost Base[/th][th]Extra cost Per Zooid[/th][/tr][tr][td]Burstopod[/td][td]35[/td][td]20[/td][td]3[/td][/tr][tr][td]Claw[/td][td]30[/td][td]16[/td][td]3[/td][/tr][tr][td]Flail[/td][td]20[/td][td]6[/td][td]3[/td][/tr][tr][td]Flak[/td][td]55[/td][td]20[/td][td]8[/td][/tr][tr][td]Leech[/td][td]7[/td][td]5[/td][td]1[/td][/tr][tr][td]Sniper[/td][td]60[/td][td]30[/td][td]7[/td][/tr][tr][td]Soul Eater[/td][td]50[/td][td]20[/td][td]7[/td][/tr][tr][td]Spike[/td][td]50[/td][td]22[/td][td]7[/td][/tr][tr][td]Sprayer[/td][td]10[/td][td]5[/td][td]1[/td][/tr][tr][td]Swarmer[/td][td]15[/td][td]6[/td][td]2[/td][/tr][tr][td]Energy Leech[/td][td]2[/td][td]3[/td][td]1[/td][/tr][tr][td]Grabber[/td][td]25[/td][td]20[/td][td]1[/td][/tr][tr][td]Miner[/td][td]45[/td][td]30[/td][td]4[/td][/tr][tr][td]Muck[/td][td]25[/td][td]15[/td][td]3[/td][/tr][tr][td]Pusher[/td][td]15[/td][td]5[/td][td]3[/td][/tr][tr][td]Sizzler[/td][td]75[/td][td]25[/td][td]2[/td][/tr][tr][td]Squirter[/td][td]25[/td][td]10[/td][td]4[/td][/tr][tr][td]Twister[/td][td]35[/td][td]15[/td][td]4[/td][/tr][/table]
As you can see, new skill costs match old ones are around 4-5 zooids. We hope that this skill cost rebalance will feel more realistic and allow better difficulty scaling for different Sipho sizes. We will monitor experience and adjust these skills costs accordingly - let us know how they feel!
Version 0.7.3f2

• Correctly decrease poison duration by 30% for each stack
  
• Balance sum skill costs around 4-5 zooids rather than 2-3. Generally makes skills cheaper
  
• Heads by default have 0 melee damage, but can deal damage if buffed.
  
• Set poison duration to 3 for real this time
  
• Fix some environment objects remaining collidable after level ends forcefully
  
• Fix environment some objects not fading out correctly
  

• Add Fixed set class for future use
  
• Muck and Poison clouds are now colliding with environment
  
• Remove Rock component from Environment Spike
  
• Fix Swarmer minion animations lagging behind. Movement Force stat no longer affects Swamer Minion speed
  
• Tweak Saenus boss 2 arena to make it unescapable
  
• Add Important setting on spawners and mark obstacle spawners as important. Do not spawn enemies inside chunks of important spawners that have not been loaded yet. Fixes rock-squished enemies
  
• Fix error when kill point receiver tries to unsubscribe from nonexisting Siphonophore
  
• Swarmer minions now crawl on top of obstacles
  
• Add timer based melee damage to all heads
  
• Kill point receivers (Soul Eater and Swarmer) kill dead Zooids on collision
  
• Pusher Penetration stat allows pushing more objects at full force by 30% per stat
  
• Improve whirlpool particles
  
• Zooid description shows Penetration stat as relevant if Ranged stat is non-zero
  
• Twister Penetration stat increases Swirl lifetime by 30%
  
• Poison debuff now has a duration of 3 (was 1) and scales duration down by 70% with each stack.
  
• Allow buffs and debuffs scale duration depending on stack count
  
• Enemy Spawner bases spawns on current wealth rather than Recent Wealth. Fixes Aquarium spawners not adapting quickly enough
  
• Add world position scale parameter to Scrolling Texture shader and use it for Muck clouds
  
• Muck doesn't affect its owner anymore. Increase Muck cloud duration to 5 (from 3.5) and radius per range to 0.3 (from 0.25)
  
• Dash now costs 20 Energy + 5 per zooid
  
• Added tooltip translations
  
• Show skill cooldown difference in tooltips. Tell players how to rebind skills
  
• Move GameKey beatifying code to String Beautifier
  
• Round energy capacity bonus instead of flooring it down. The effect is most noticeable with Energy powerup
  
• Change how extra cooldown is displayed - show delta in tooltips
  
• Cooldown translations renamed
  
• Rebalance skill costs so they scale with the count of zooids with that skill
  
• Proportionally increase skill cooldown if it is more costly than max Sipho energy. Display skill cost energy breakdown in tooltips
  
• Gray out energy regeneration buff if it's irrelevant
  
• Fix growth points improperly registering themselves at manager
  
• Improve skill tooltip to show skill energy costs
  
• Reduce flak shoot audio latency
  
• Update Burst and Collections packages
  
• More speedy Growth Point generation
  
• Forcefully end level if player doesn't clear it in 5 minutes
  
• Change object layer to Ignore Raycast when sinking to avoid unnecessary raycast hits
  
• Stagger sinkable sinking
  
• Serialize Zooid connection angle masks
  
• Remove duplicate standalone input module
  
• Set Growth Point parent to be the same as zooid button parent
  
• Do not despawn growth points that are going to be used - improves growth performance
  
• Fix incorrectly caching zooid button children
  
• Use growth manager to store growth points instead of searching globally
  
• Use lazy initialization for Zooid Buttons when Sipho structure gets changed
  
• Use Burst to calculate growth point positions
  
• Use Burst compiled MatrixUtility outputs as out rather than ref so they can be inlined
  
• Also store zooid connection angles as bitmask
  
• Do not throw errors when no Area is loaded
  
• Remove unused trail renderers from movers
  
• Remove pushing capability from Saenus Jet. Change dash multiplier from 2 to 3, reduce drag from 0.25 to 0.2, increase health to 11, do not penalize turning force - set it to 1
  
• Parametrize Dash multiplier
  
• More robust way of instantiating System Callbacks singleton
  
• Do not regenerate Drifter health when zooid is dead
  
• Update one of builtin Saenus layouts to be more menacing
  
• Reserialize sprite atlases
  
• Better utilities for Layout editing and refactor of layout selection logic for Campaign levels
  
• Only apply buff if base stats are relevant rather than current
  
• Update project to Unity 2019.4.17f1
  
• Tweak Spike and Santa hat to behave more controllably
  
• Serialize zooid component references in prefabs. Serialize zooid radius instead of calculating it from collider
  
• Update two Cra'Than layouts