Spirit Ocean "Beta One" Dev Log

After a long wait, a new demo for Spirit Ocean is now available. This release marks the game entering it's Beta phase, with the focus of development shifting from internal systems to game and story progression.
Here are all the major changes made since last build, copied from the README

OVERVIEW

    UI Rework

    Game progression and save states

    Overhauled NPCs

    Rebalanced weapons

    New enemies

    New abilities

    New consumables

    New fishing minigame

    New areas

UI

    The title screen has been given a new look and feel

    A settings menu has been added for adjusting video and audio

    HUD elements were recreated with better programming, art is currently a placeholder

    Dialogs for selecting missions, abilities and more

GAME PROGRESSION

    You now start the game without any unlocks. You have to find them throughout the world.

    The game's progression persists after quitting. You can only save your game in Centria Tower.

    If you die before getting back to the tower, you will lose your progress.

    There is some backtracking involved to proceed. Listen to what the NPCs have to say, they will help you!

    You start out with a limited amount of health and energy. These can be expanded with DNA codices, you'll need to find 3 for an upgrade.

NPCS

    Redesigned from the ground up. NPCs can now be defined as both friend or foe.

    You can talk to the same NPCs that you can attack. For this demo, friendly fire has been disabled for the most part.

WEAPONS

    Every weapon has been adjusted to fit within a certain range and time to kill. Certain weapons excel against certain enemies.

    New railgun alt-fire: Grapple, capable of tethering enemies towards you. Can also tether you towards ice blocks.

    Shooting water with the Icenine Launcher creates blocks of ice.

    Icenine launcher creates ice puddles at all time. This will be nerfed eventually.

    Melee attacks can perform combos on NPCs, propping them up into the air while keeping them stunned. This is more useful against high HP targets.

    Melee detection is now a bit more consistent

ABILITIES

    New ability: Dexterity, melee damage increases with every sucessful sword attack

    New ability: Fortify, prevents hitstun and knockback on damage

    New ability: Recon, capable of highlighting enemies through walls and debuffing certain enemies

    Removed ability: Seeker, didn't function properly and had limited use in combat. Replaced with HX grenade.

CONSUMABLES

    Consumables, unlike abilities, purely focus on combat situations. While neither can be restored on the field at the moment, ability energy will be restorable in the future. Consumables have a fixed quantity, and can only be refilled at Centria Tower, so their use must be planned wisely.

    Injector - Restores up to 2 charges of health

    EX Charge - High explosive damage, capable of clearing debris

    HX Grenade - Slightly less damage than EX Charge, holds more, can't clear debris

    Armor Plate - Protects against bullets. A special upgrade scales this with your energy with Fortify equipped, giving you very high bullet defenses

    Adrenaline - Restores your stamina when empty. Experimental, capable of breaking stuff. Very fun!

FISHING

    Fishing is an activity you can do after getting an Ethereal Angler. It lets you tap into the Spiritual Substrata to find all sorts of strange organisms trying to make their way back to the ocean. At the moment, there is no practical use for fishing. But in the future, you'll be able to unlock costumes with the fish you catch.

NEW AREAS

    Every level has been recreated using a new Trenchbroom workflow.

    Multiple missions per area have been scrapped in favor of a more adventurous backtracking approach to non-linearity.

KNOWN ISSUES

    Performance dips in some areas due to NPC logic processing and mesh occlusion. Some optimization tries to mitigate this.

    Camera water clip does not function properly due to convex surface collisions

    Melee detection isn't *perfect* and enemies in hugging distance can sometimes fail to be registered. Bullets work fine though.

    Level fade-in might not cover the screen properly on 4:3 monitors

    Heavy mech enemy rotates instantly, obscuring its legs and making it difficult to tell which ones are vulnerable

    Frame stutter, as well as flickering in shadows and fog, may occur due to the way Godot handles shader compilation. These subside after some time.

    In the case of a malformed/corrupted save file, the game will refuse to load or break in strange ways. The only way to fix this is by deleting the save file.