General Update #44

Hey there!

Two posts in one day?? Yep, it it is one of these days.
We have some news to share with you about Silent Echo and Starwatch, let's get into it right away!

Starwatch

We've made some really nice progress on the game, and the good news is that we're closer to completion than ever!

One of the new things we were looking to implement in Starwatch was a new system for combat called immediate skills, which are skills with instant effects that do not consume a turn.

You may remember than in Silent Echo, tactical skills like Bloodlust or Adaptive Nanites consume a turn. This is not very fun from a gameplay standpoint, as it feels a lot like your turn was wasted for no particular reason just so you could get the buff.

We're looking to correct that in Starwatch, first by having these tactical skills have their own slot, and second by having them function as immediate skills. This means that unlike before where you had to use Bloodlust, wait for the turn to play out, then benefit from the buff on your next attack, now you will be able to use Bloodlust and use the benefits of the buff on your attack right away.

We feel this will make combat more dynamic and we plan to roll out more tactical skills in the future so each of them have their use in particular situations.

Content wise, we have fully finished the first out of the three companion quests meant to be available with 0.4.0 and currently working on the last two.

We also wanted to ship the first two expeditions in this update, but considering what's happening with the Itch situation, we feel we can release these with 0.4.1 instead and get 0.4.0 in your hands faster, which will hopefully allow us to return to healthy development cycles for Starwatch Academy.

Essentially, what's left for us to do is polish a couple of the talent trees, add some more companion content aboard the ship (most notably with Eva), and the two missing companion quests.

We're now confident the update will be released as planned, somewhere in August.

Silent Echo

We've also made excellent progress on Silent Echo lately. As you may have seen from the image above, there are new customization options coming to Zippy's experimental station.

The first is tattoos, which were initially meant to be released with 0.3.2a. This is an experiment in adding additional customization options, based on a previous poll we've ran. We'll be shipping the next version with two tattoo types. If there are particular tattoos you'd like to see added to the game, feel free to let us know!

The second addition is more important, and with a lot more work involved. Everyone has different tastes, and some players have regularly voiced that while they like the corruption/transformation aspect of the game, they were disappointed that the main character turned pitch black, or that the breasts became way too big for their taste.

The team has listened and in the next version, once you have reached Corruption 6, a special encounter will be available in Zippy's lair that will unlock additional customization options at the experimental salon.

Corruption will allow you to choose between all previous types of corrupted skin, ranging from the original level 2 uncorrupted skin, to the full-on alien level 6 skin.

Breast size functions similarly. Until now, breast sizes were tightly tied to corruption levels. We've reworked how breasts work in the game and now each corruption level has its own variants for each breast size. This will allow you to swap between 4 possible sizes. If you preferred the small titties from corruption level 2, you will now be able to revert to them for a small price, while still keeping all the benefits that come with corruption level 6 like the essence system.

We're currently in the process of updating all of the Chapter 3 sex scenes, as this change means we need to add new variants for female scenes, as we initially only designed them with corruption 5/6 visuals, but we do feel it's worth the time spent.

That's it for this week!
Have fun!