Hi everyone, welcome to the latest Dev Transmission – a monthly roundup of what we’ve been working on.

Adam, Alex and Sean are beavering away on Major Update 1, which is estimated to release at the end of June. There’ll be a preview version posted up on a beta branch in advance for those that want to help test it, we’ll post an announcement when that’s ready.

Anyway, here’s what we’ve been up to in May:

As mentioned last month, this is an important new system for the game that both caters to varying difficulties and provides greater run variety. Because of this, it’s a multi-discipline effort to get the basic feature working, the associated UI to make your choices at the start of an escape and a hell of a lot of balancing to go with it.

On this menu you’ll be choosing which ship you’ll launch with and they provide different modifiers and levels. You’ll also pick which campaign route (aka difficulty) you’ll travel along which influences the amount of sectors you need to escape through, what sort of equipment you can gain along the way (i.e. to get the highest tiers you need to play the harder modes) and other difficulty modifiers.

More vessels and difficulties are unlocked as you play and as we continue throughout Early Access we can expand this with extra ships, campaigns and levels.

Last month we showed some of the new variants for one of our larger bipedal enemies. Keen-eyed readers may have spotted the cover image showing one of them carrying a large metallic shield. Here’s some concept art of that plus the new ranged weapon they carry:

We’ve also finished a new enemy archetype we’ve not previously talked about this month too, and we’re looking forward to watching you battle it soon :)

The Collective have been monitoring SDP comms traffic and know how much you detest the flying enemies, so are preparing two additional ones to enter the fray:

(Original flyer included at the bottom for reference)

To counter this, the SENTRY Defense Program has been processing combat data and has prepared a new deployable to deal with those pesky flyers:

It’ll only be able to suck up so many until it jams and needs to purge before it restarts, although this can be improved with upgrades.

Last month we showed a new weapon called the Riot Gun, and we have concept art for another 3-slot weapon to show you that we’ve been working on this month:

We’ve been chipping away at a whole bunch of miscellaneous tasks from both our own lists and those generated by the community, ranging from some optimisations around visual effects, adding support for status effects to impact the player, polishing the latest new level based on Discord playtest feedback and general bug-fixing, polish and balancing.

In our previous monthly update I finished off with some cool content from the community.

Discord user Jajomba is at it again, with some creative use of the Vortex Grid to create a shortcut in Mess Hall (repurposed into a YouTube Short with his permission): https://youtube.com/shorts/AV3wHaWXvKc?si=_9aMlX7DmwxA43Az


And finally some fan art from Discord user ocddragon. They affectionately refer to these enemies as “Glubbies” and drew one hitching a ride on its larger cousin:

Got some fan art or cool gameplay captures? We love seeing them, so send them to me on Discord or our socials!

We’ve got a big list of your feedback we’re keeping track of and using to improve the game, so keep telling us your thoughts! Even if we don’t respond to every single one, be assured we read them all. You can reach us on all these places:

• Steam forums
  
• YouTube
  
• Twitter
  
• Facebook[www.facebook.com]
  
• TikTok[www.tiktok.com]
  
• Instagram[www.instagram.com]
  
• Discord[discord.com]
  
• Newsletter signup[sentrygame.com]

We’re looking forward to you getting your hands on these latest changes when Major Update 1 launches at the end of June (or sooner if you play the beta branch version) – and we’ve already got a huge list of other cool stuff we want to add in future updates too, for more on that check out the Roadmap here:

https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/news/app/1252680/view/5921742839579227575

Thanks for all the support and if you haven’t done so already, please leave a Steam review!

Hi everyone, welcome to the latest Dev Transmission – for those new to our community it’s a monthly roundup of what we’ve recently been working on.

We’ve got a huge list of feedback from all of your posts and reviews – once I’d finished collating everything it was very pleasing to see that as a community you want very similar things from the game and are closely aligned with what we have planned for Early Access.

Here’s some of what we’ve been up to:

We’ve started work on a new menu that will be displayed before your ship takes off from Earth. On this screen you’ll choose several options and it’ll be the foundation that a lot of future Early Access updates will plug into (like co-op and ship selection).

For Major Update 1 though, this will be where you choose your escape route, which informs run length and difficulty.

We know that our community has different difficulty requirements – some people find the game too hard, some too easy and the difficulty curve can have too much friction. These escape route options allow us to cater to those varying differences in a way that doesn’t break other areas of the game. For example, easier difficulties will be shorter, balanced appropriately and only have a certain tier of equipment to find, but provide a smoother challenge for those that need to ease into the game. As the run difficulties step up there will be more sectors to fight through and greater tiers of equipment to collect. This also allows us to eventually open up hardcore difficulty modes to challenge those who are currently dominating.

Enemy reinforcements are inbound! These new enemies will allow us to expand some campaign lengths beyond two sectors.

I’ll try not to spoil things now as we’ll show more of these in due course, but one enemy that is being expanded is the Heavy enemy that wields the plasma minigun. We’re providing different tiers of this like we have with other bipedal enemy types and here’s some concept art of the lower and higher tier versions (the current version is seen in the corner):

This enemy will also be getting some weapon variants – which we’ll reveal later along with the other new enemies.

If the enemy is getting reinforcements it only feels fair for the SENTRY Defense Program to provide new equipment to help defend their ship.

We’ve added a couple of low tier deployables that were in the demo but didn’t make the full game, and designed some new deployables to fill missing gaps – in particular one that is good at dealing with flying enemies :)

We’ve also designed some new active and passive gear so expect to see more of these in Major Update 1, alongside a couple of new weapons. We’ve focused on getting one in-game first before we decide which one to make next, but here’s some early concept art of the Riot Gun:

When we reveal the finished version of this weapon you can refer back to this image to see which elements we progressed into the final design.

We’re planning new levels to add to the current ship layout, which puts us in a good place to create new ship layouts in future major updates.

Sean has made one of these levels thus far, dubbed “The Crossing”. We’re testing it in greybox format and once we’ve finessed it we’ll pass it over to Alex to do the art, but here’s a work-in-progress shot:

Adam has been doing optimisations and you should see improvements in combat. While the game will always run slower with 30 enemies on screen than 3, for those final wave moments where there’s a lot of AI around any dips you experienced shouldn’t dip as low.

There’s more juice to be squeezed out here, and we’ll continue to optimise throughout Early Access – while you’re waiting on those enhancements, check out this post here for performance tips.

We’ve been doing lots of balancing, bug-fixing and polish tasks and working through feedback that you’ve posted on the forums, reviews etc. I’ll list these in the changelog when Major Update 1 releases.

Now that the game is out, I thought it might be nice to finish off the monthly Dev Transmissions with some cool content from the community.

First up is Discord user Jajomba, who sent this clip of a particularly skillful shot (that I repurposed with his permission into a YouTube Short): https://youtube.com/shorts/jjYhs3IaAMc


And finally, some lovely fan art from Discord user TheCartoon1st. They drew their own SENTRY, and then imagined what a battle-scarred veteran would look like:

If you have any of your own gameplay captures demonstrating impressive skill or cool fan art send them to me on Discord!

Keep the feedback coming! It goes into a big list we’re keeping track of and improves the game. You can reach us on all these places:

• Steam forums
  
• YouTube
  
• Twitter
  
• Facebook[www.facebook.com]
  
• TikTok[www.tiktok.com]
  
• Instagram[www.instagram.com]
  
• Discord[discord.com]
  
• Newsletter signup[sentrygame.com]

The additions outlined above are going into Major Update 1, and we’ll continue working on these plus more during May. We have A LOT more planned for the game in future Major Updates throughout Early Access, of which you can read about some of our plans here:

https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/news/app/1252680/view/5921742839579227575

In the Roadmap we estimated each Major Update would take somewhere between 2-3 months, as this is the cadence our last Early Access game did with the same team size (one artist, one designer, one programmer). Thus far that estimate is still looking accurate, but for those who want to test an earlier version we’ll be putting it on an opt-in beta branch a couple of weeks ahead of release – we’ll let you know when that’s ready.

Thanks for all the support and if you haven’t done so already, please leave a Steam review!