What the closed test will have in it
This is a progress log. I have been quiet for two weeks, and this is what went into the game in that time.
Everything I have is going into the closed test on 28 September. I do not want to be late, and the quickest way to be late was to keep writing posts instead of code. So two weeks of silence, and this is what came out of it.
One thing first. Both developer accounts are through, Google Play and Apple, so the road to your phone is open.
The Reclaimer
A machine in your headquarters that produces around the clock. Credits, Powder and Karat, at a rate set by how far you have pushed the campaign, into a store that fills in eight hours at the start. Open the app, claim, go.
It is the floor of the economy. A player who opens the game once a day still moves. It will never pay like playing does, and that is on purpose.
Leagues
The whole PvP ladder is in, from Bronze up to Bloodstone. A league is a week inside your zone: six days of scoring, five tries a day against a list of three drawn from the seats around yours, and on Monday the table settles. Promotion, demotion, payout.
Walk through the gate and you hold a seat. Stay outside and nobody can draw you.
The Clinic
You can now infect an agent with a parasite. Four strains, each one doing something different to the body it lives in: Venom kills, Marrow endures, Nerve reacts, Enzyme feeds the skill. Each strain grows its own organs, and the organs are the abilities.
Vials pay for every step and time grows it. A parasite at level ten mutates into the next rarity and opens another slot. This is where two agents of the same class stop being the same agent.
Programs
The research tree, finally. Six divisions, each a tree of modules, and one Lithograph at the top that runs one program at a time. Wafers fund it, and Wafers come from the Tech Lab operation.
Every module is drawn on the schematic from the first day, so you can read the whole road before you pay for the first step.
The campaign
The story side got a lot wider. A chapter is now forty battles: twenty main missions up the centre line and twenty side missions hanging off them, with a chest that fills every ten stars.
Main missions carry the story and open the doors: a station, the skills, the Programs. Side missions are where I put the challenges. A squad of one. An overrun with eight of them coming. A mark that has to die by round three.
That is the scope of the first test.
One week, then the stores
What is left, in order: the worst bugs, the rough edges in the UI, and the economy. Calibration has waited behind every system on this page and it cannot wait any longer, because a test with a broken economy tells me nothing.
I have one week for that. The week after goes to the store builds. Review takes as long as it takes, and I want to be through it before the 28th, not on it.
See you there.