This post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details.
Upgraded AI
First up, our programmer John Winder has upgraded the guard AI with some new tricks:
Errand buddies: if there are enough guards in a cluster, they'll take a buddy when they go off on errands. If the errand guard needs to check on a terminal, the other one watches their back while they do it.
New patrol patterns: as well as visiting terminals, guards will sometimes now check on key rooms in their sector, including any locked up loot.
Ship search: reinforcements that teleport in have a new search behaviour that lets them scour the ship for you.
Back to work: guards who left their post to investigate your antics will now eventually return to their original posts, but stay on high alert.
Lifelink: a new variable on some harder missions gives the guards in a sector an electronic link to each other - if any of them goes down, the others will sound the alarm and run to investigate. This prevents you thinning out a cluster by waiting for guards to wander off and taking them one by one (or two by two). Crashing a guard takes them off this network, subverting them crashes the whole network.
New UI
Usually when I die in Heat Sig I'm saying "oh god!" or laughing, but every now and then it felt unfair. I eventually traced these frustrating cases to a quirk of the UI. Guards show an alert bar that fills as they start to recognise you, and as soon as it's full they'll shoot. But if they're currently in the process of sounding the alarm, that indicator replaces the alert bar, so you're left with no sense of when they're going to fire. Dying to that sucks.
So we've redone the UI so we can show both the guard's alert level and their alarm indicator at the same time, when we need to.
We've also changed the alarm indicators themselves so guards now specify why they're sounding the alarm: a body? A gunshot? Or did they actually see you? If the alarm ever goes off unexpectedly, pause the game and zoom out - you should always be able to see who's sounding it and why they're spooked.
Quiet Guns
Alarms were also causing another subtle design problem I didn't put my finger on until after release. They often made the game feel... fragile. Guards take 0.5 seconds to recognise you as an intruder, and 1 more second after that to sound the alarm. It was meant to be tricky to take a group of guards out before any of them could fire, but easier to take them all out before they sounded the alarm.
In practice, though, it didn't work that way: if anyone fired at you, even if you dodged it easily, someone in another sector would always hear the shot and sound the alarm before you could possibly get to them. You effectively had 0.5 seconds to take out everyone.
We've done two things to solve this:
- Guard's guns are now 'Quiet'
- 'Quiet' now means 'Can't be heard through walls'
You can still bring Loud weapons on a mission if you like them, but the ones the guards fire will never be heard through walls or closed doors. This means if you can take out a group of guards before any of them can sound the alarm, no matter how many shots were fired, no-one else will know anything is amiss.
I really like dodging my way through a slow motion gunfight, taking everyone out elegantly, then having that lovely stealth-game feeling that the situation has been contained.
This post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details.
