Helloooo Agents () Been a while. Today I bring you DDS version 0.8! This comes with the finale to the stackhunter sidequest, new missions, new toys to play with, and lots of new story content. This update is brought to you with some excellent art from Emett! Theyre always a pleasure to work with. Go check out their work and commission something from them here: https://twitter.com/KSteakay A special thank you to everyone who left a positive review since the last update. Ill include some development details after the changelog for anyone interested. As always, be sure to join the discord if you have any bugs to report or suggestions to make. New Stuff

• Completed Stackhunter Sidequest. This comes with a new mission, and tons of story content.
• Added Frejya
• Added Shark Attack!
• Overhauled much of the player gun code. Many gun abilities now apply to the players gun(s) instead of their character model.
• Changed how player accuracy sight works. This can now appear on multiple guns at once.
• Mounted guns can now be instructed to continuously fire.
• Introduced a new stat rolling algorithm. If youve seen my video on this, you might have spotted an error in how I was creating random distributions. This error occasionally generated guns that were suckier than they should be. The new stat rolling algorithm should not have this issue.
• Added an ez hack panel for Freyja if you have that option enabled.

Fixed and Adjustments

• Silence ability extended from 4.33 seconds to 15 seconds in duration. No longer a John Cage reference but feels much more usable.
• Toll booths now deal damage equal to mission level. These things are a much bigger issue later into the game.
• Fixed many typos.
• Removed some naughty words from the game dictionary.
• Fixed a bizarre bug that prevented the background shaders in the PGD from spawning if the player picked up a particular chiplet earlier in the game.
• The network graph is now open automatically in the tutorial. Too many players were missing the message on how to open it and ended up playing the entire game without a mini map LOL
• Fixed a bug with the Become Succ perk that caused it to not apply the perk downside. Somehow this perk is always broken idk why.
• Non lethal melee weapons have a 1.5 second stun floor, so theyre all guaranteed to do at least something.
• Enemy patrol radius reduced from 30 meters to 15 meters. When enemies hear something and go to investigate, theyll mill about the area in this radius. This makes distracting enemies a more viable strategy.
• Increased speed of blackout animation
• Fixed several bugs associated with hacking grenades through walls, and after they exploded.
• Added a new fade shader to many trees and torii gates in the game.
• Sewer level now specifies that you need to spike the target computer.
• Fixed a bug causing bows to override the sound of the next melee weapon you picked up.
• You can now backtrack through options with ctrl+tab since shift+tab opens steam overlay

Known Issues

• All abilities are meant to work with Freyja, but there are lots of weird bugs I couldn't get around to fixing. The idea is Freyja should compliment your build rather than erase it. It'll take a few updates before everything is working properly.
• Deluge has some bugs, this mode is getting a small rework down the line anyway so I'm just ignoring them for now.
• There are LOTS of dumb story flags in this update. I tested almost all of them but there are a few permutations that might be a little broken if you played the 0.7.9999 preview update on Itch. Testing everything switching between versions of the game was just too much work, but this shouldn't be a problem for most of you.
• Some players reported issues with the new gun aim sight. I was never able to recreate this on my end but I think I found the problem and fixed it.
• Freyja's ez hack window is kinda ugly. Made the thing last night in like an hour, will probably get a fresh coat of paint down the road.

Development Update The 0.8 Update has been in the works for a looong time. There is a lot more I wanted to add, including an entire alternate route. Those things might appear in a post 1.0 update Im calling DDS: Consequences, along with other cut features. After treading water on this side quest for so long, I wanted to release it and get back on track for 1.0 release. Im happy with the state of it. All the best (and worst) ideas ultimately made it in. Im aware development has slowed down a bit and want to address the reasons why. A few months ago I graduated from grad school and landed a great job. Im still working on DDS just about every day, but it took a few months for me to figure out my work-life balance. Some of the Stackhunter sidequest was extremely difficult to implement and that put a damper on things too. Thank you all for your patience while I got this done. () There are only a few things left to do before we reach 1.0. This includes:

• An alt-route to the main quest (3 new missions)
• Roguelike mode
• Possibly 2 more standalone missions (might get booted to post 1.0)

Ill be taking the rest of December off to play around with my next project, and Ill get a hotfix out to fix 0.8 bugs if need be. Im planning on spending January working on fixing annoying issues, adding some new enemy types, visual improvements, new abilities, fun stuff like that. February we'll start charging through the rest of the 1.0 requirements. Gonna move back to a weekly update schedule after this month, so expect more regular content drops! Releasing in big chunks is more efficient, but I get kinda anxious when DDS goes without an update for too long >.< Happy holidays! Thank you all again for keeping up with DDS and supporting the project.

[ 2023-12-21 20:26:26 CET ] [ Original post ]