I'm going to start going ahead and doing these posts even for the alpha. So here are the release notes:
http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Bionic_Dues_Alpha_Release_Notes#Alpha_0.905There are a LOT of changes in here, and I think the game suddenly feels much better. The notable stuff worth commenting on:
1. Tutorial popup stuff! If there's anything I am missing here, please do let me know. That's one of the main barriers before we let in the new alpha players, so if the existing alpha players will provide some good feedback on this I'm sure all will appreciate it.
2. The game now uses a pessimistic line of sight rather than a permissive one. The details of that are in the release notes, but the short of it is: you can't see as much when you are in tight spaces, particularly around corners. But you also can't shoot through walls, and neither can bots. I was very skeptical of this at first for a variety of reasons, but as Misery pointed out I think that people will just keep complaining about the old method as a bug. The new method, the more I've played with it during testing today, really does feel very good, too. So I'll be very interested in feedback on this one.
3. Enemy alert logic has been really updated and should make way more sense (and intuitive sense) now. It also shows you the alert state of enemies in FOW now, which is also important.
4. The enemy pathfinding is waaay better now. I thought it was still using the battle-tested Skyward pathfinding, but as it turns out that got (ahem) switched at one point to A* instead, which I'm not as keen on and which was not working entirely properly in this case. Now it does, and crowds of enemies are way more effective at approaching you. The whole thing with enemies having too short of a range to really get you often is becoming a bit more moot here, as with the crowds you have to watch out for them flanking you despite their short range.
5. There is now an explicit mission exit tile in each level, rather like the exit stairs in most roguelikes. This lets you keep playing after the mission is won, in order to get more loot or whatever.
6. The bug with the auto-win or auto-lose for missions after a certain point is now fixed. That plus a number of other bugs. Not sentry turrets yet, though, I've not had time quite yet.
7. Ammo on all of the middle-capacity ammo weapons and large-capacity ammo weapon has been reduced quite a bit. The reasoning for this is in the wiki, and it's actually getting back to the design as we had it a week or so ago (well, the equivalent -- we shrunk the mission sizes but forgot to shrink the weapon ammo accordingly). Feedback on this is very welcome, as the idea here is to make you feel ammo pleasure in a fun and tense way, not a frustrating rage-quitting sort of way.
Also there may be some changes needed to the efficacy of ammo-increasing parts, but I wanted to take this one step at a time.
I think those are all the big points, although there are certainly a lot more things actually in the release notes.
Enjoy!
